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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http: //books .google .com/I N \ ' 4 M * *RELIGIO. LAICr JUDAICA .\ ■i ■■ * **^ M * .♦ >► «RELIGIO. LAICr JUDAICA .\ I t I i f I ) * For my salvation must its doom receive, Not from what others^ but what / believe.' Dryden, Religio Laid. } 'RELIGIO LAICr JUDAICA The Faith of a Jewish Layman LAURIE MAGNUS, M.A LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE St SONS, LIMITED Niw 'yo«il_; BLOCH PUBLISfflNG CO ■9°7 i 4 t 1 ft PHILIPPO' PATRI- FILIVS- . FILIOLO- PATER- D'D'D- Contents CHAP. PAGE I. 'Religio Laici' Judaica: A Conserva- tive View i II. Practical Jvdaism: I. Law and Life 38 III. Practical Judaism: II, Life and Law 64 IV. Jew and Gentile: I. In the Past . fo2 V. Jfew AND Gentile: II. In the Present 132 VI. The Function of Hebraism : A Lay i Sermon 158 ix * *. A CHAPTER I ' Religio Laici ' Judaica : A Conservative View ■ A RECENT movement in the Jewish commun- ity in London, and a recent book by one of its spiritual leaders *, have imported a flavour of party politics into the affairs of Anglo- Jewry. If it is not altogether true to say with Mr Gilbert's hero that every little Jew or Jewess is born either a Liberal or a Conservative, it is at least apparent that these party names are acquiring a real and a somewhat urgent significance in that small but influential sec- tion of Jewish thought which has its seat in this country. The Uberal case has been stated with singular lucidity and force in Mr Montefiore's volume ; and if in these pages I attempt to state a more conservative point of view, it is partly because it seems to require- Liberal Judaism : an Essay. :e. Macmillan, ^fipre. Macr By Claude G. Monte- 2 'RELIGIO LAICI' JUDAICA restatement in these times, and partly, too, because it is a good thing to try to justify to oneself views and opinions which one instinct- ively defends. The attempt need not take the form of a criticism of Mr Montefiore's book. But something will have to be said of the views which that book expressed, and it will be convenient to quote them in Mr Montefiore's own words. These do not, as he is at pains to remind us, commit any one else at all, either to the views themselves, or to the particular shape which he gives to them. At the same time, Mr Montefiore will have found a number of people to agree with him, and most of them, it is fair to assume, will be wilhng to accept his language as an adequate expression of their thought. In this sense, and, without violating Mr Monte- fiore's claim to speak about ' that particular and individualized form of Liberal Judaism ' which he himself happens to hold, Liberal Judaism, as he interprets it, may be taken as a definite conception corresponding to a definite set of opinions, which are shared by a definite section of the community This means a good deal. It means all that 1 that^J rA CONSERVATIVE VIEW 3 implied, in journalistic language, by a " parting of the ways ' and a ' crisis ' in affairs. It means that the Jewish community of Eng- land is dividing itself into two camps, the orthodox and reform, or the Conservative and Liberal, or the old and the new, for the classification is strangely familiar, and the simplest forms of expression are the best. Can the old beliefs put on their new clothes ? Can the Jew who conscientiously rejects the tradition of the inspiration of the Pentateuch attend the same public worship as the Jew who conscientiously accepts it ? Nay more, can the same name ' Jew ' continue to include them both ? Or does the so-called New Criticism set a bar between Jew and Jew, leaving the traditionalists to defend a lost cause and a forsaken belief — on the side of the angels, it may be, but of angels who have been superannuated — and placing the Liberals or Liberationists at the head of a movement of reconciliation in which, as precedent ordains, the sword is the instrument of peace ? To many of us it will seem a pity if no via ^ media is found. To many, again, it will ^Hseem imperative that no via media should ^ » 4 ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA be found, for the disputes of theologians are beyond the remedy of compromise. But with these opinions, and their consequences, the present writer has no concern. There will never be wanting the advocates of dis- sension and destruction. There will never be wanting those adherents to a creed who find their expression in a perpetual protest. Re- ligion has always been the fruitful mother of conflict. Perhaps, as the deepest emotion of which the huAan race is competent, it is subject in a peculiar degree to the universal law of competition. Religion, Uke teeming earth, feeds on its own decay. It recalls to a vivid imagination the slaughterous and parricidal habits of the gods in the old Greek myth. Orthodoxy produces Protestantism ; Protestantism, Dissent ; each devours, or is devoured by, its offspring— the martyrs of one generation are the tyrants of the next ; victor and victim there must ever be on the road to Zion, as to Rome. In any state of society which exists by internecine strife . certain advantages attach inevitably to the winning side. This, again, is in accordance with natural law. Withoi louti^J I A CONSERVATIVE VIEW the assiired enjoyment of victory's fruits there would be no heart in the fighting ; and Protestants in religion have this, at least, on their side, that the brightness, the dash, the ^lan, the glamour of audacity and eUort, are as necessarily and inalienably their per- quisite as tail feathers adorn the peacock. ' They prophesy falsely unto you in my name : I have not sent them, saith the Lord of Hosts.' But against this bare, bald state- ment of a claim must be set the fascination of novelty, and daring, and revolt — a fascin- ation which is hardly correctly described and dismissed as meretricious, because it is an actual part of the natural process of develop- ment, and as such we must reckon with it and aUow for it. In rehgious affairs, far more than in political, the Conservative case is severely penalized by nature. Changes which might frighten" men in the conduct of the State, changes which might affect their purses, or unsettle their homes, or disturb their land-tenure, or otherwise touch their material interests, tend to attract them on the spiritual side by providing that grandest recipe for recreation — variety without re- ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA ^ sponsibility. A certain personal trouble is involved in taking a holiday for the body. But the soul can enjoy a change of diet, and leave the consequences to others. Our spiri- tual nature, so to speak, and so speaking for the majority of mankind, is endowed with a vicarious digestion. We sing the psalms, and the Church does the rest. Accordingly, if certain Church dignitaries recommend a new form of psalm-singing, the mere novelty of which is an attraction in itself, many of us are quite content to transfer the responsi- bihty as before, and to quicken our spiritual appetite by a change of diet and occupation. Then the Protestant leader is liable to com- mit the mistake of little great men, and to make an end of his means. The temptation to form a new sect, instead of reforming the old, is too often irresistible. Indeed, it would sometimes seem as if the universal church has to await the hour till it can come as a unanimous reaction against the multipli- cation of churches and the meticulous diver- sity of creeds. There are signs of this process in the Jewish community, and the most dangerous sign of » A CONSERVATIVE VIEW all is the refusal to discuss it. Silent change is intolerable because it is so easy. The suc- cess of the corybantic method, as Huxley described it, will be increased tenfold if no sound is heard from without. More than this is involved in the matter. One hears so frequently to-day that this or that feature of religion ' does not appeal ' to some seeker after spiritual rest that one tends to forget whose, after all, is the blame. This dispensa- tion by default, this irresponsiveness in the worshipper, is not in itself a proof that the old creed is outworn. The cry for change finds an echo, and some may mistake the sound for an answer to their own prayers ; variety, too, is a safe tonic, and the satis- faction of the patient is not always a symptom of disease. At least, it may fairly be urged that before throwing over the old forms some effort should be made to discover the secret of their vitality, and to determine whether this complaint, this tedium of the synagogue and its consecrated usages, is an indication of spiritual strength and intellectual awaken- ing, or is merely a by-product of the forces of ignorance. There is no more plausible ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA ^ weapon in the whole armoury of dialectics than the appeal to common sense. Common sense is the grandest demagogue, yet it is not to be trusted out of sight. The most excellent things in life — half its passions, and all its emotions — should listen to it, and pass by. The appeal from faith to reason, with the intellectual flattery it involves, is more often than not an appeal from light to darkness. Gemeinsinn is the cleverness of das Gemeine, and in affairs of the soul, as in affairs of the heart, common sense degrades, not exalts. There is only one thing more flattering than the appeal to common sense in a context of this kind, and that is the discovery of an unsuspected soul. Traditional, or conser- vative, Judaism to-day has to counteract both these subtle perils. It has to meet the intellectual peril, and overthrow it ; it has to take account of the latent spiritual long- ing, and teach it to find satisfaction without prescribing invalid's food. In other words, it has to correct two rather morbid tendencies, the tendency to an undue respect for one's own intellectual doubts, and the tendency to an exaggerated care for the nice requi ires^H r I I A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 9 ments of one's own soiil. These tendencies it must show to spring from a defect of the intellect and an excess of the spirit. Judaism, as a religious system, demands in a high degree the quahty of intellectual imagination,, and it reduces nearly to a minimum the spiritual claims of the individual. There is no confes- sional in the synagogue ; salvation is adminis- tered in big doses ; and, mortifying as this may be to the self-esteem of the sickly soul, it yet seems to correspond to such imperfect observation as we are privileged to make of the Creator's relation to the world which he created for his praise. He does not inter- fere to save any one man among us from the consequences of his acts or from the exercise of his volition ; and public wor- ship, if it express the homage of man to God, * must, one would think, be satisfied with the revelation of God to man. The attempt to establish .in the synagogue a form of ritual which shall admit a more intimate and personal ^^ communion between the worshipper and the ^H Deity seems to the conservative Jew to con- ^H tain the elements at least of a morbid and a tZZT" ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA if I for a public purpose. It directly encourages the hysteria of the confessional. It eviscer- ates Judaism, leaving the empty husks of ceremony and tradition in the place of the , Uving fruits offered on the altar of the sanc-| tuary. All this is negation and invective. But something of this point of view must be stated at the outset of a conservative apologia. The most cherished feelings of the conser- vative Jew are outraged by such hypotheses as the following from Mr Montefiore's volume : ' The liberal Jew cannot regard the Law as the centre of Jewish belief and practice. If he were founding a public service de novo, he would not make the reading of the Law its central and most important feature. If he were building a synagogue, without refer- ence to past custom, he would not put scrolls of the Law into an ark, and make that ark the most sacred part of the building. If he had such an ark, he would put in it the pro- phecies of Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah, rather than the Pentateuch, for the Prophets are more primary and more essential than the Law.' ' The prominent references to the Law the liturgy can easily be given a new and dif- ferent meaning by "liberal" worshippers, lie ^^ inH J I ^ but A CONSERVATIVE VIEW II To them the Law is no longer the Pentateuch, but the Moral Law, before whose majesty all men must bow. That is the Law to which they ask God to " open their hearts". That is the Law which they trust may " become pleasant in their mouths". Or, again, the Law is the will of God. That we may know and do God's will we ask him to grant us "understanding and discernment". Or the Law is the Hebrew Scripture as a whole, which still remains the formal and constituent charter of Judaism, and of which we may truly say, " Blessed art thou, O Lord, who hast given it to us". In these various ways, which, because they are freely acknowledged, are not sophistic or insincere, we may adapt the language of the liturgy to our own behefs and aspirations.' ' There are persons who want to maintain the Jewish race quite apart from any religious consideration. There are some who would even go so far as to speak of the Jews as a " people " or a" nation '\ and would desire to keep up, as they call it, the national idea. Such persons would object to intermarriage on purely " racial " or " national " groimds. There are others who combine these grounds with motives of religion. There are others, again, who, while by no means assenting to the theory that the Jews are a nation, have yet a sort of sentimental, uru-easoned, atavistic feehng of race, and dishke the notion of inter- L ^ 12 'RELTGIO LATCI' JUDAICA marriage. With all these I am in disagree- ment. If it were not so, I should indeed be guilty of a contradiction when I desire the " denationalization " of Judaism, and support the counter theory of an " Englishman of the Jewish persuasion ". A man can only belong to one nation at a time. But, heart and soul an Englishman by nation, one can also be heart and soul a Jew by religion. But by religion only. The mere race is unimpor- tant ; it has no influence upon action.' The basis of all this reconstruction, this readjustment of the spiritual compass to an altered mental horizon, is placed in the alleged incompatibility of modern knowledge with traditional Judaism. The ' higher ' criti- cism of the Bible puts a definite stop to the uncritical standards of former generations. It is no longer admissible to say, ' What was true enough for my fathers is true enough for me.' Reason iorbids so pusillanimous a surrender to tradition and sentiment. It proves that Moses never wrote the Pentateuch. At the touch of its analysis the fabric of the Mosaic Law crumbles into dust. Its new Bible is sprinkled with A's and B's and C's, like a kind of alphabetical index to its multipl Itiple^J KA CONSERVATIVE VIEW 13 uthorship ; and, naturally enough, those rfho use this critical apparatus, or those more particularly who use it at second or third hand, think that their case is proved •when they say, ' How can we repeat, " This is the Law which Moses set before the chil- dren of Israel ", when we know (i) that it is not the Law, and (2) that Moses did not pro- mulgate it ? * Liberal Judaism concedes these objections, and repairs its tenement accord- ingly. Certain passages of the Pentateuch it omits, as wholly inamenable to reason. Certain others it modifies in order to adapt them to reason ; and others, again, it sub- mits to a fresh interpretation, at the expense ^^ more often than not of their essential sap. ^B By this process of selection and rearrange- ^Bment it discovers ways round the Law, by which to evade or to transform its original obhgations, and with the simple but ingenious device of stating that ' Moral ' is sous-entendu whenever the Liturgy says 'Law', it pro- vides a ready escape from inconvenient fetters. But ' Moral Law *, we must all admit, is a phrase peculiarly susceptible of liberal inter- ns pretation ; and if loyalty to the Jewish race t4 ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA and observance of the Jewish religion can satisfactorily acquitted by obedience to the moral law, and if the injunction to obey it is recommended by a comphment to the mental powers of the rational disciple, then we ma; close our arks or furnish them with tracts o] Utilitarianism, and hold up to the congre- gation of Israel the admirable and demon- strable truths of Bentham and the younger Mill. A pained surprise is sometimes express at the outer darkness in which we live, wl have informed ourselves of the latest resull of the researches of Biblical criticism, and who yet continue to uphold the authority of the Law, and to practise the religion of our forbears in the forms which it prescribes, as far as they are compatible with the conditions of modern life. The answer is that the two things have nothing to do with each other. It is the characteristic of liturgical language (conservative Judaism replies) to provide for emergencies of that kind. Liturgical language never pretends to scientific exact- ness, and when science comes along and proves it inexact, it readily admits the charge, ] re-'^^ 3n- ;sse^^H who^H sulta^l A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 15 ^Hbut claims, as it has always claimed, the quaHty ^of a higher truth than the truth of scientific demonstration. The problem was stated and solved, a generation ago, in Matthew Arnold's Essay towards a better Apprehension of the Bible. ' The language of the Bible ', he wrote, ' is Uterary, not scientific, language ; language thrown out at an object of conscious- ness not fuUy grasped, which inspired emotion. Evidently, if the object be one not fully to be grasped, and one to inspire emotion, the language of figure and feeling will satisfy us better about it, will cover more of what we seek to express, than the language of Hteral fact and science. The language of science about it will be below what we feel to be the truth.' To weigh language of this kind in the crucible of science is to apply, as Sir Leslie Stephen put it, ' a totally inappropriate test. . . . The churches ', as Sir Leslie continued, not without a touch of irony, ' would escape a good many difficulties, and apologists a good deal of trouble, if they could boldly follow Arnold and say that they do not appeal to the reason, but to the imagination ' (Studies of a Biographer, II, 118). The Jewish Church » of a Biogra^ i6 * RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA need not hesitate to follow Arnold to this extent. It may go further and say that the fxinction of religion is to appeal to the imagi- nation, and that a religious system which failed to make that appeal, and which could be approved unexceptionally by human reason, is a system which omits the Unknown. And the Jewish Deity possesses that awful attribute of unknowableness. Conservative Judaism prefers, in the full exercise of its intelligence, and with eyes and ears all open, to leave something to the imagination. It uses figurative language consciously — deUber- ately, one might say — and with a keen sense of the added power which is thereby lent to expression. In this way even the much abused opening verses of Genesis, which the higher criticism expunges as wholly unreason- able and unacceptable, and which are omitted, accordingly, from the new Revised Version of its highly sensitive disciples, contain a truth and beauty distinct and distinguish- able from the truth and beauty in their kind of the scientific theory of origins. It is no part of my purpose to attempt defence of the imagination, but it is inten ^B A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 17 ^KiDg at least to try, in quite untechnical ^* language and doubtless very imperfectly, to describe what might be called the psychological process of beUef in the mind of a religiously disposed man, to whom the obvious inac- curacy of the first chapter of Genesis does not in any wise impair its spiritual appeal to his religious emotions. We must suppose him standing in the position of the psalmist : ' When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained ; what is man, that thou art mindful of him ?, and the son of man, that thou visitest him ? ' In other words, our Jew — ovi ideal synagogue- going Jew — is in a mood to realize the tre- mendous vastness of the universe, and his own immeasurable insignificance as a unit Bon the face of one planet. Yet, oppressed and awestruck as he is, he recovers to a certain extent his failing sense of self-respect by the reflection, which inevitably suggests itself, of a purpose and an order which have been imposed upon, or are discernible in, the chaos. Light and darkness, water and earth, Iseedand fruit, these display a distinctness and L i8 'RELIGIO LAICI' JUDAICA regularity which even the infinitesimal unit — individual man — can plainlyrecognizeand turn to his own uses. His terror is changing, accord- ingly, to a kind of wondering admiration, blent with which is the feeling that, within his own range of observation, all this orderly procession on a scale hardly conceivable to a finite intelligence is designed for, or has served, the growth of his own importance. Take the psalmist's reflection again : ' For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands ; thou hast put all things under his feet : all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field ; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.' Note here how inevitable, to use a hackneyed word, is the psalmist's expression of his mood. Can any one, feeling those emotions, and seeking language to express them, speak more truthfully or more beautifully than the author of this psalm ? ' The work of thy fingers ' is imaginative language, but is it therefore untrue ? Is it not the nearest approxi? roxi? ■ J A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 19 ^^nation which a imperfect instrument can "fashion to the conception which cries for utter- ance ? Can science, learned in all tongues, suggest a satisfactory substitute for that thought in that mood ? It is the language of humiUty, the language of adoring gratitude, in which the facts of observation, wherewith science is concerned, are transfigured by the hght of imagination. And that light reveals a higher truth than the literal statement of the facts. It utters a truth which satisfies at once a more spontaneous, a more universal, and a more elevated demand of the mind than mere reason ever formulates. In the insoluble problem of the destiny of man, in which all speech is falteringj at least it reaches the level of what we feel to be the truth, below which, as Arnold says, the language of science falls. And, so reaching, it proves its own truth by its power to heal and to console. It is the expression which was sought for ; imagi- nation can essay no higher flight. Now, assuming this mood, and using the sole form of speech which can even approxi- mately express it, let us try to write the story 20 'RELIGIO LAICI' JUDAICA the moiilds of the first chapter of Genesis ? First the void, and the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters. Then the various types of^order, ascribedby a figure of language, accurately fashioned by the aid of the highest human imagination, to the Presiding Idea, the designing finger — God. ' And God called ', ' And God said ', ' And God set ', ' And God created ' — surely Reason would pull Truth down from her magnificent eminence if it reformed these symbols in accordance with scientific fact. Surely these phrases remain the supreme and perfect expression of those facts as grasped by imagination, and surely the language of science about them must altogether omit their emotional aspect with its claims on our adoration and our gratitude. Above aU, the glorious refrain, ' And God saw that it was good ', with its crescendo biurst of music at the end, ' And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good ', is an inseparable part of any account of creation which shall satisfy the emotions and the intellectual imagination of mankind. The burden of the universe can only be relieved in a religious mood by the 1 I A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 21 ervid statement of the truth, the fervid con- lession of the belief, that what is, is good. Art and poetry describe it as the impression Bof truth upon beauty, and of beauty upon truth ; science cancels it altogether, as irrelevant to demonstration ; but religion proclaims it from the first in language that carries its own conviction : ' In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. . . . And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.' The days, as stages of •this work, present no difficulty to belief. No one pretends that they are literal ; no one disputes their truth on the ground of scientific inaccuracy. Facts, after all, are imponderable things, and reason is a shifting standard. It changes from year to year, from one generation to another. Facts are very far from the last word which the intel- lectual emotions can state to spiritual faith. Whether the problem be attacked as one of verbal inspiration, or as one of the mean- ing of truth, it is equally illiberal, in my opinion, to presume to settle it on the spot. ^fcXransfer the argument for a moment to the 22 * RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA less controversial field of classical scholarship. Virgil wrote a Hne : ' Sunt hie etiam sua praemia laudi ; SuDt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.^ This verse is rendered by Mr Frederick Mya ' Tears waken tears, and honour honour brings. And mortal hearts are moved by mortal things.' Sir C. Bowen translates it : ■ Tears are to human sorrow given, hearts feel for mankind.' Wordsworth rewrote it : ^H 'Tears to human suffering are due.' ^H Tennyson echoed it in his apostrophe to Virgil; ' Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind.' Dr Henry, optime de Marone meritus, explains rerum as ' the world ', and writes on the text that it forms ' a general reflection concerning human sympathy, viz. that tears are part of the constitution of nature, and to be met with wherever there are men.' Professor Tyrrell declares that he is ' not sure that all its meaning has yet been fully unfolded. r A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 23 I Surely in this famous verse Virgil meant more than Wordsworth in the Laodamia. . . Sinely these words, which seem full of a natural magic, come to us with a diviner air and a grander message than this. . . . May not the words, which cannot but strike one as fraught with some new and exquisite fancy, bear a meaning far more definite, weighty^ and distinguished ? . .. E'en things inanimate (res, the material picture) can weep for us, and the works of men's hands {mor- talia) have their own pathetic power.' Dr Mackail, in his brilliant manual on Latin Literature, writes with a touch of mys- ticism : ' In the most famous of his single lines he speaks of the "tears in things" ; just this sense of tears, this voice that always, in its most sustained splendour and in its most ordinary cadences, vibrates with a strange pathos, is what finally places him alone among artists.' And so forth, and so forth. For the disputa- tions of critics on this verse might be inde- finitely quoted. Res may be rendered ' human sorrow ', or ' the world ', or ' inanimate things,' and Virgil's meaning in the verse may be H and Vi 24 'RELIGIO LAICI' JUDAICA totally different from our own. He may have intended a general reflection on the constitu- tion of the universe, or a specific comment on Aeneas looking at a picture. But the point of the analogy is that the credit in either case is Virgil's. In the process of the suns a newer and a deeper meaning may have been read into his verse. He remains triumphantly its author. He drew it from the well-spring of truth ; its truth is his truth for ever. Though he may have been inspired with a message the full sense of which he did not understand, the verbal inspiration is unassailed. Similarly, if the Pentateuch contains verses which later ages invest with deeper meaning than they may originally have borne, it is stiU no falsehood to proclaim : ' This is the Law which Moses set before the children of Israel.' The hidden meanings which revealed are also a part of inspiration. Let me take a homeUer analogy to illus- trate the problem of truth. I may say : ' This lunbrella was given to me by So-and-so in such and such a year.' The stickler for facts comes along, and asks a series of ques- tions. ' Has your umbrella been re-covered 1 n 1 A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 25 ' Yes.' ' Have you had a new stick for it ? ' ' Yes.' ' And a new frame ? ' ' Yes.' ' And a new ferule?' 'Yes.' ' And a new handle ? ' ' Yes.' So he writes his alphabetical appen- dix to my simple statement of the truth and draws up a learned scheme of ' Umbrella A ', ' Umbrella B ^, ' Umbrella C ', ' Umbrella AB'j and so forth, the while I continue to proclaim, with the pertinacity of Word- sworth's simple child, and the inconsequence of his boy from Kilve, that ' This is the um- brella which So-and-so gave to me in the year such-and-such.' I accept all his facts as true, but they do not in the least affect the higher truth of my statement, not do they shake my faith in the essentialadentity of the umbrella, enriched by its traditions and associations, with that of the donor whom I name. Similarly, I may admit without demur the evidences of the higher criticism, and yet not relax my belief in the sovereign truth of the words : ' This is the Law which Moses set before the children ^^ of Israel.' It is a very shallow cleverness ^H which confounds the exercise of the imagina- ^H tion with the condonation of a lie. 26 'RELIGIO LAICI' JUDAICA far from conclusive, in the opinion of the a servative Jew, is the appeal from faith to reason, or from the spirit to the word. One point only should be added, which the higher critics tend to overlook, or rather, which is immaterial to their argument, and which those who follow them do not reahze. An inspired text is not necessarily a text which is inspired in every word. Traditional Judaism, I venture to think, is much more moderate than its opponents. It recognizes at least three elements in the inspired text, as we receive it. First, the message ; next, the interpreter ; lastly, the audience. Human agents were chosen to communicate the divine will, and something doubtless was lost in this first process of transmission. Further, the transmitting agent had to make his communication to a heterogeneous audience, and that second process of removal from the original Voice involved a a fresh adaptation of the message. The Pentateuchal formula is commonly : ' And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them.' Now, taking the thing quite literally, it is. :oqi^H y, it ^^^^J CONSERVATIVE VIEW 27 obvious that in any attempt to repeat to a large mixed class the words of a supreme auth- ority, a certain admixture must take place. There is not only the mind of the transmitter, but the mind of the receivers to be considered. Each will colour the message on its way ; ■ and there will be in the resultant text the ele- ment of Moses and the element of the children of Israel, as well as the original code. The recognition of this fact, which, indeed, is nowhere disguised, by no means detracts ■ from the inspiration of the Pentateuch ; but it doeSj I venture to think, tone down the asperity of the dogma, as Mr Montefiore states it on p. 95 : ' The truth is that liberal ■ Judaism has ceased to be a legal religion. In a legal religion the central feature is a belief in a perfect and God-given code, all the enact- ments of which must be scrupulously obeyed and fulfilled. Orthodox Judaism still de- clares that this belief , with all its implications, constitutes an essential dogma of the faith.' ^^ Personally, though I do not pretend to obey ^H every injunction in the code, it seems to me ^H far more reasonable to take them as they stand, ^H and to fulfil them, than to cry out that 28 ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA Judaism has ceased to be a legal religion cause the ' higher ' critics have discovered by a roundabout way what the author oi the Pentateuch states in every chapter of his work, that the Law was removed from the Legis- lator by a double process of transmission. It is not the business of the ' higher ' critics to point out the limitation of their arguments, but it is the business of Judaism to make sure how far the proof of contamination affects the claim to inspiration. On all grounds alike, I venture to think, the claim to inspiration can defend itself, without taking recourse to the noli me tangere of mere obstinate orthodoxy. By the substitution of imagination for reason, as the properer canon of judgment, by the recognition that the contents of expression are not exhausted by the intelligence of any one generation, by the perception of a sub- stantial truth behind the shadowy appearances of facts, and by the humble realization of the Deity of Exodus, xxxiii, 20 : ' Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me, and Hve ' — in this spirit Biblical criticism may be greeted as a welcome guest in the man- sion of faith. It will increase understanding -^j ■ ling^J A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 29 [where it dwells, and not disturb the peace of the household ; it cannot abuse the hospital- ity which it receives, for the utmost resources of its art do not touch the fringes of belief. It is not knowledge which is to be feared, but the inferences that ignorance may draw from it. There is little to be added to this survey. But this at least should be apparent, how- ever imperfectly shown, that the conservative Jew will be far better equipped to meet attacks ■ on his beUef and temptations to apostasy than his liberal brother. The hberal Jew of Mr Montefiore's book is everlastingly apologiz- ing for himself. On p. 126, ' he will not refuse ■ to obey a law, or regard its public observance as undesirable, merely because it is a cere- monial law, or merely because he can no longer faeheve that it was divinely revealed to Moses by God. Its observance may still be desirable from different motives.' On p. 155 he regis- ters the general reflection that ' it is impossible to create festivals to order. One must use those which exist, and charge them, where necessary, with newer meanings ' ; and'provi- ^K dentially ', he concludes, on p. 166, 'the 30 ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA Sabbath and the Festivals, the Day of M( morial and the Day of Atonement^these can all remain. We can still use them fitly for religious and spiritua] ends.' To a reverent mind this kind of reconstruction is most objectionable. It suggests that Judaism is a bankrupt concern, with certain fixtures and furniture, which go with the lease of the pre- mises, and that these must be taken over by the new tenant, pending, as Mr Montefiore writes, on p. 133, ' a modification of the Syna- gogue structure.' The conservative Jew, on the contrary, is happUy reduced to no such humiliating makeshifts. He does not even subscribe to the ifse dixit of the liberal Jew : ' We go to Synagogue not to hear a recital of laws or stories, but primarily to pray ' (p. 133). The primary object of public worship, he would venture to maintain, is to rivet the links which bind the congregation together, and which bind together the congre- gations of Israel. No link can ever be forged out of the personal prayers of individual members which shall resist, as Israel has re- sisted, the persecution of the centuries. Syna- gogue is a place for prayer, as is every other 1 T I I I L J A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 31 Hplace — the open field or the bed-chamber — * where man attunes his mind to communion with God. But Synagogue is first and foremost the place of pubHc worship, a central meet- ing-place and resting-place for the scattered congregations of the Jews. There they assem- ble to use, to display, and to assert their last common possession of religion, with the aid of a book of common prayer. Certain ex- pressions in that book may or may not appeal to this or that member of the congregation. His feeling, however, may be disregarded, for the fault most probably lies in his own imperfect realization of the purpose which the Synagogue fulfils. Most probably he misses the sanction in history or tradition which attaches to the usage ; and the remedy should first be sought in a careful study of the Prayer-book. Even so, it is inevitable that the forms of public worship will not exactly correspond to the needs of the individual soul. Pubhc worship is bound in a certain degree to be crystaUized by sentiment and made rigid by convention. Its 'atmosphere', to use a stock phrase, is necessarily different from that 1 of personal prayer, and any experiment which ■ of persona 32 ' RELIGIO LAICr ' JUDAICA aims at a coalescence oi the two must end in destroying the purpose for which the Syna- gogue exists. The thrill and the glamour remain. The force which, as Mr Montefiore writes, draws a number of non-observant Jews to Syna- gogue once a year, on the Day of Atonement, is not, I venture to beheve, to be explained and contemned, as he contemns it. Their attendance does not prove that ' they are silly enough to think that by this annual rite they may ward off some of the consequences of misspent lives and evil deeds ' (p. 162). This is a harsh saying, which entirely misde- scribes the lives and deeds of many who are faithful to the annual rite, and to no other ritual ceremonial. The true explanation, it seems to me, is in the magnetic attraction of tradi- tional rehgion. On some it acts more power- fully than on others, but the framers of the ancient ordinances of the Jews wrought more surely than they knew. The bonds by which they riveted a rebellious people to the Law prove their strength by this phenomenon . Once a year at least even indifferent witnesses come to the congregation of Israel, and claim their 1 rA CONSERVATIVE VIEW 33 ^| place with the rest. Once a year at least they ^^H testify to the living Law, and are drawn ^^^ within its fold by the force that is in it . Would a Day of Atonement, stripped of its tradition and ceremonial, denuded of its historical associations, make anything like the same appeal ? Mr Montefiore writes : ' The mod- em Day of Atonement is purely spiritual. It is true that most Jews still fast for twenty- four hours, but no one ascribes any efficacy to the fast. It is an old custom, which does no particular harm, and is an exercise in self-control . It has some disciplinal an d ascetic value. . . . The fast is, however, a minor and subsidiary feature. In every other respect the day has only to do with fimda- mental religious ideas, with the conceptions of sin, repentance, reconciUation, and atone- ment. Such a day is absolutely fitted and useful for every human soul ' (p. 163). But Judaism, before it concerns itself with the requirements of the human soul, is concerned ^^ with the public expression of religious behef . ^ft The fast is very much more than ' an old ^H custom which does no harm'. The fast ^B is the outward sign, the symbol of a common 34 ' RELIGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA worship ; its roots are set in human nati itself. It acts as the trumpet-call of the Synagogue, to draw the congregation together. Fasting is not atonement, for the less does not contain the greater ; but a public system of reUgion, as distinguished from private confessionals, would hardly survive its foundation if it neglected men's bodies in providing for their souls. It was the weak- ness of mediseval Judaism, when transported to modern surroundings, to care for the body overmuch, to forget the Law in its symbols. Against this, the Protestant movement of EngUsh Jews in 1842 was a healthy reaction ; but a new movement of Dissent, which would abolish the symbols altogether, or relegate them at least to a more subsidiary place, and pack away the ark in the lumber-room, is a very different thing. To put it at its highest, it trusts too much to unassisted spiritual desires. The question of discipline in reUgion and the problem of race might both be discussed in this context, and from either point of view a strong case could be made out for conserva- tive Judaism. But my object in these chap- lap-^l rA CONSERVATIVE VIEW 35 ^H ters is at once more modest and more difficult. ^^| I have been trying to show how the forms of ^^1 r I public worship, as practised to-day, may still retain their hold on religious-minded men who do not ignore the results of BibUcal criticism, and how, from the contrary point of view, the effects of Biblical criticism and of scientific discovery rather strengthen religion than relax it. They show more clearly and definitely the part played by the imagination, and the manner in which its language fulfils the shortcomings of other modes of expression. One can speak only for oneself in a context of this kind, and person- ally, at least, I feel no sense of insincerity, no impulse to set myself right with the critics outside, when I repeat the consecrated formula with all that it implies : ' This is the Law which Moses set before the children of Israel.' When I echo Solomon's prayer — surely the most perfect expression of the longing of the human soul — ' What prayer or supplication soever be made by any man, or by all thy people Israel, which shall know every man the plague of his own heart, and spread forth his plague 01 nis own neart, and spread lorth his 1 ^K hands towards this house ; then hear thou in ^^M 36 ' REUGIO LAICI ' JUDAICA heaven thy dwelling-place, and forgive, an< do, and give to every man according to his ways, whose heart thou knowest ' — I de- liberately prefer, on spiritual grounds, to preserve the ' environment ' of Solomon, who ' built an house for the name of the Lord God of Israel ', and * set there a place for the ark, wherein is the covenant of the Lord, which he made with our fathers, when he brought them out of the land of Egypt ' (i Kings, viii, 20 — 21). All this to the Conservative is not merely true, but vital. It helps to make a difference between his pubhc and his private worship. It has the essence of commonalty ; it is a part of the constitution of Israel, transcending the life of individuals, and passing into the possession of the race whichcannot fail. Grant- ing a share of comparative sanity to these views, the practices of religion gain enormously by holding them. Warmth, romance, andimagina- tion ; immediateness and directness ; tradi- tion, sentiment, and association ; these quali- ties which appeal to children, and to the eter- nal child in man, are added at once to the colder lights of a ' purely spiritual ' faith. The object-lessons of belief are added to ] the^ A CONSERVATIVE VIEW 37 abstract teachings of morality. And for the searchings of the speculative reason, with which human curiosity concerns itself, surely the whole philosophy of conduct is contained in a verse of Deuteronomy : ' The secret things are for the Lord our God ; but the revealed things are for us, and for our children, for ever, that we may perform all the words of this Law/ In the last chapter I attempted to state as clearly as I could the point of view of a mode- rate Conservative towards the question of observance. Here I must go a step back- wards. A personal rescript for religion is inadequate to the needs of the age. It does not touch the root of the problem, which is to make the solution of universal efficacy and, application. One postulate must be assumed, and it is so self-evident that it can hardly be disputed. The average man — as such, the sum and epitome of endless statistical calculations and sociological hypotheses — requires ' God ' at some point. Let me write the first personal pronoun for the average man, and once at least in my hfetime I must determine for n r I. LAWf AND LIFE 39 myself and by myself the meaning which I attach to that word. God begins where science terminates. The God-conception supphes the links which ■ human science has not forged. God belongs to the region of faith and belief ; science to that of research and demonstration. There are thousands of good men to whom the ■ terminus of science is a terminus ad quern. If they could attain the sum of human know- ledge, they would have found their Holy Grail. They neither seek nor admit aught beyond. For them, unlike the sphinx, humanity answers its own riddles. I disagree with these matter-of-fact people ; or,' rather, to put it more modestly (though modesty ■ on a question of this kind is too commonly a cloak for indolence), I find the result unsatisfy- ing. I cannot exclude 'God' from my philo- sophy. The facts of human knowledge, in my opinion, are far too imperfectly correlated, far too crude and indefinite, to be explainable by themselves. I can no more build a philo- ^K sophy out of experience than my ancestors ^H could make bricks without straw. Personally, ^H I cannot see how any system of thought can 40 PRACTICAL JUDAISM satisfy all the requirements of human inteUei without providing for the imaginative reason. The boldest figure of speech in the Old Testa- ment, as bold and as figurative in its kind as Watts's picture of Hope, is contained in the last verse of Exodus, xxxiii, ' And I wiU take away mine hands, and thou shalt see my back parts ; but my face shall not be seen.' Now, this Unseen, or Unknown, requires a name in our vernacular. We meet it too often on the frontier of every science to pass it by without a name. So I want ' God ' in my philosophy. I want a con- ception to represent the Infinite Unknowable when I reach it. My idea of the Unknowable is God, and in this sense, at least — a very prim- itive sense — I may call myself a religious man. Or is this claim too big to be supported ? I am not a pedant about language, but I should like my words to be exactly equivalent to my thoughts. My need of the God-idea does not make me a religious man : it makes me a religious-minded man, and I have stm to choose beween the various creeds and the various types of their adherents in order to satisfy my need. ectj^l A I. LAW AND LIFE 4f ^P I am conscious that, as a religious-minded man, my need of the God-idea is far more intellectual than moral. Let me dweh upon this for a moment, for it corresponds, I believe, to the implicit, but unexpressed, experience of very many others. There are . systems of rehgion which bolster up moral deficiencies, or defective systems of morality. The .' hell ' of the Calvinists and Puritans, the dour and sour tenets of the Presbyters, the fire and rack of the Inquisition, are all on the * moral plane, and were designed, more or less effectively, to make men good by fear of God. The ' fear of God ' in Judaism, to which I shall recur, is a far more philosophic conception, and moves far higher springs of conduct. But on this question of intellect and morals, while I ' want religion ' or ' seek salvation ' quite as keenly, though, I hope, not as noisily, as any corybantic Salvationist, the object of my need and search is mainly intellectual. I do not — it is a personal experi- j^^ ence — I do not expect to become more good ^B by practising religion. Its practices may ^B have that indirect effecl;, but their primary 42 PRACTICAL JUDAISM ledge stops short of satisfying men's intellec- tual requirements : Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand. Little flower — but ('/ I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. Thus Tennyson popularized this reflection, and, writing of ' Knowledge ', he says ; Let her know her place ; She is the second, not the first. A higher hand must make her mild. If all be not in vain ; and guide Her footsteps, moving side by side With wisdom, like the younger child : For she is earthly of the mind. But Wisdom heavenly of the soul. In Memoriam, exit These passages are full of meaning. Apart from the beauty of their diction, they convey valuable truths which help us in our daily necessities. For this intellectual want is not restricted to Sabbaths and Holy Days. Any day, and at any moment of any day, we may be confronted with a situation in which human authority fails. The light we see by and the air we breathe — every physical function — every act, conscious or uncon- on-^H T. LAW AND LIFE ^B scious, in obedience to a physical law — all these ultimately demand a superhuman explanation. Earth is our nurse, not our ■ mother ; the secret of our being is not here. Such things affect people in various moods and in varying degrees ; the poet most deeply, the materialist least ; and religious systems which supply the want have not escaped the fate of other human expedients. The man who practises religion is apt gradually to find that its efficacy depends on quantity rather than on quality. A religious system, in other words, is Ukely to degenerate into super- stition. When we say, ' Thank God for my good dinner ', ' God bless you ', ' Please God ', and the like, we are probably merely superstitious, and not really religious. In practice, we are breaking the second com- mandment, and taking His name in vain, as much as if we used one of the oaths of the mzirket. For we mean something much less than our conception of God should imply. We do not actually postulate a relation between the fact o£ having taken food, or of . parting from a' friend, or of invoking success, 44 PRACTICAL JUDAISM The use of these phrases is analogous to the excesses of the dram-drinker, or to the adver- tiser's trick of speaking of piUs as infallible. It is simply a case of exaggerative language, and, though certainly best avoided, is a ques- tion of good taste, not of ethics. At the same time, it is a question which has a definite bearing on the problem of con- formity. A rigid conformist is likely to be so much inured to the use of the symbols of the system that he mistakes them for the reUgion itself. He introduces the God-idea, symbolically, into almost every act of his life. The great acts of birth, marriage, and death are obviously consecrated by such symbols j their ritual and ceremonies need not here be rehearsed. But the God-idea enters into his food, separating the clean from the unclean and the liquid from the solid under hygienic recommendations raised to Divine commands ; it enters into his clothing, into the shape of his beard, into the orna- ments of his household, until it is Hable to become an end in itself instead of a means to hohness, and until the mere observance of the hedges round the Law becomes the s the^J I. LAW AND LIFE ^■spirit of the law, and the life conducted in that spirit. To the nonconformist Jew, on the contrary — and the contrast may be extended to other creeds — all this symbohsm is optional. He relegates it to its proper place — the place of its origin — as reminders and remembran- cers of the spirit which resides behind the symbols ; and, keeping that spirit stedfastly and conscientiously before him, the observance of the signs is irksome and distracting. But perhaps, in his access of rationalism, he tends to forget that the average man must not look for exceptional treatment. Special exemp- tions and special acts of grace were reserved in the Middle Ages for those who could afford to pay for them. We pay now in different coin, but the principle is the same ; the average man must be content with the accepted standard of public worship. Further, a dis- tinction is to be drawn between pubhc wor- ship and private faith. Between the guise of thought and action under which I introduce the God-idea, and the standard of public worship to which I willingly conform, there Lis the difference between the individual and Kis the 46 PRACTICAL JUDAISM the community. The community is something more than an aggregate of individuals ; it is their harmonious aggregate ; and, to pro- duce that harmony, each unit must give and take. Therefore, there are two skeins to unravel. First, the operation of the God- idea, and, secondly, its pubHc expression. ' Nur das Gesetz kann uns die Freiheit geben', — Goethe's pregnant aphorism is alUed to a hundred phrases in sacred and profane literature. Let me adduce two examples only : ' I will walk at liberty, for I seek thy precepts ' (Psalms, cxix, 45) ; ' pure law commeasures perfect freedom ' (Tennyson, ■ • t •^1 t « « 4 • • » • . > - •' • ' X. ' I • I \t I 2m» -^ o-^ •^•w iV '■MM * m.m •.«<» V«<« l'< ittttiti \ \ \ \ . \ % \ \ r "Vr la:: '^tj::5 that voiux Iumw ^n. !»»,i.m^ ZZ2Z cozie and go, nlliu:: »mii Iuu. \^»»!» u ipirit, pouring its bKuul ih* *- »mm x.m 82 PRACTICAL JUDAISM certain seasons in the year, certain days anniversaries, when no lower language than this will satisfy his needs. He cannot be thanking God at every hour of the common day. Philosophically, perhaps, he should, if he referred everything to first principles, but, prac- tically,he does not, and the omission is compen- sated by the fact that the God-idea does not grow too familiar. But if, for example, his emotions are stirred by birth or death he does not find it an adequate expression of his feel- ings to contemplate the statistical regularity of such occurrences. Statistics, however ingeni- ous, however interesting at other times, do not speak the language which he wants. It may be an excess of sensibility, but his mood is too exalted for that expression, though he finds it adequate enough for the ordinary occurrences of every day. Life and death, in other words, in relation to the microcosm, demand, in aU but the most insensible, a religious expression for the moods which they induce. So I want to thank God for the flowering of the earth ; so I seek His assurance that the winter will lift ; so, too, I turn to Him when a change in the calendar and^^ lendar JH II. LIFE AND LAW 83 reminds me to number my days ; so I wel- come a day once a year to spend in communion with truthj away from the distractions of the world ; so I pay my aanual tribute to the liberties of my race, and once a week I devote a short two hours of practice to the lan- guage of the higher imagination which is current beyond these voices. Sabbath, Pass- over, Pentecost, New Year, Tabernacles, . Atonement — the solemn cycle is complete : the few days are set apart for the satisfaction of the religious mood, which, if my premisses are correct, is not the arbitrary hypothesis of an autocratic church, but arises out of natural conditions in every full-grown consciousness. This cycle of observance represents the demand of the Jewish ' law ' on Jewish life. Excluding the fifty-two Sabbaths, it works out at a trifle less than two per cent, of a man's lifetime, by no means an excessive de- . mand on the holiday-making capacities of the I race. The Levitical code requires the obser- vance of the Passover (lirst and last days), Pentecost (one day), Day of Memorial (one day), Day of Atonement (one day), and I Tabernacles (first and last days) — seven days ^H Tabernacle 84 PRACTICAL JUDAISM in all. Each, moreover, is associated with a specific mood of feeling, cultivable, and eminently worthy of being rescued from the aU-engulfing stream of affairs. I need not re- hearse these associations in detail ; dull, in- deed, and infirm must the Jewish sensibility be which does not thrill to the memory of the Exodus, to the blowing of the trumpets, to the summons to conduct, and to the rejoicing of the Law ; while those who do not respond to the call of the nature-festivals, with their Paganism consecrated by ' imaginative reason ' — to use Matthew Arnold's fine phrase — are victims of hyper-civilization. Literally, the appeal is magnificent ; symbolicaUy, it is weU-nigh irresistible, and the prophetical writers are careful to explain that the real value of observance resides in the spirit rather than in the letter. The Sabbaths supervene, but I do not urge their plea here, because every man more or less regularly is bound to rest one day a week. It is a law of Nature, as much as of religion ; or, rather, like aU. the laws of the Jewish religion, it rests primarily" on natural founda- tions. Those who agree with me as to the re- 1 H quir II. LIFE AND LAW 85 I ^m suci quirements of the religious mood need no goading to the synagogue ; but the preachers, perhaps, should remember that cities are built beside rivers, not rivers beside cities ; that the synagogues, in other words, were built in places and at a time from which the stream of hfe is tending to recede, and that the week- end in the country is an inevitable result of cheaper and quicker means of travel. The comparative emptiness of west-end places of worship at certain seasons of the year is not necessarily a sign of the weakening of the re- Ugious life. It is not possible, I think, and it is certainly not desirable, to lay down absolute rules as to what is lawful and unlaw- ful on the Sabbath. Parents may safely be left to decide such questions for themselves, guided by the obvious general principle that the rest enjoined for the Sabbath is altruistic as well as personal, but that, if people of another creed prefer to rest on the first day instead of on the seventh, there is no reason not to employ their labour. The Sabbath is to be called a \delight ' and an ' acceptable day to the Lord ', and there should be no difficulty in arranging such a change of occupation as will satisfy 86 PRACTICAL JUDAISM these titles. It is ill dogmatizing about details, but life, I believe, will seem fuller and less fleeting if the tale of weeks be punc- i tuated with Sabbaths. Therfe is still to be considered the catalogue of ordinances, recommendations, and prohibi- tions, ranging, as I explained in the last chap- ter, from neighbourly love to the shape of aJ man's beard, and providing, as a whole, an almost cyclopedic guide to the conduct and hygiene of life. If such life, indeed, were | twice as long as it is, and three times as beauti- ful, if it were now as it was then, the modern Jew would find no difficulty in observing every ordinance of his code. But this standard of observance contemplated, and still requires, a set of conditions different from those of to- day. Life was leisurely and minute ; a day's journey was not measured by the motor-car ; the world was not circumvented by electricity ; men found time to say God be with you, and j not clip it to good-bye. For better or worse— or let me be frankly optimistic, and declare I my creed that it is for better- — we do clip our leisure to-day. The little courtesies dis- appear. We cut our cloth according to our II. LIFE AND LAW 87 measure, and have no time to lace a ruff, or to trim a peruke, or to give our Lord double bowings. The omission of ' second day ' obser- vance may be defended on this ground pre- eminently. It was introduced in an age when the exclusion of the Jews from participation in the world's affairs threw them back on the resources of religion ; and, with commend- able lack of originality, instead of inventing new feasts, they doubled the old. I confess to similar time-serving in regard to some older ordinances. It is not difficult to defend a retention of the laws as to inter- marriage, circumcision, and barmitzvah, and a simultaneous repudiation of the dietary laws and sundry minor injunctions. No amount of discipline or repression can put back the hands of the clock, or undo the work of our fathers in opening the Ghetto gates. The common rights for which they fought so strenuously bring common duties in their train. Let us frankly remember that heroes of liberation have been added to the heroes of the Law. The book of Jewish history is never closed, and the calendar of Hebrew saints has been reinforced since Moses and the Prophets. ] 88 PRACTICAL JUDAISM In England we cannot refuse a place in Pantheon to men like Lionel Rothschild and David Salomons, who, at considerable personal sacrifice, and not for personal aggran- dizement, taught Englishmen how to practise liberty. ' The ghetto ', says a writer in the new Encyclopedia Britannica, ' which had been designed as a sort of quarantine to safe- guard Christendom from the Jewish heresy, had in fact proved a storage chamber for a portion of the political and social forces which were destined to sweep away the last traces of feudalism from central Europe.' We, re- visiting the Middle Ages in the daily columns of Russian correspondence, see these stored- up forces reissuing from the ghettoes of the Tsar ; and the grand, pitiful spectacle should remind us that, if liberty was worth winning, if it was well to emerge from the ghetto, then the spirit of the men who compassed it is a part of the Jewish inheritance, and reform is as logical and defensible as Mosaic Judaism itself. We let reform come in by a back door. We slip and sUde, and drift away from so-called legal Judaism into a species of hberal Judaism, which does not necessarily correspond to the n the^l ) the ^m r II. LIFE AND LAW H facts, actxial progress made — and made deliberately by earnest Jews — in the direction of logical reform. Often we let go what we shoiild retain, and cling to what were well omitted. Our want of systematic thought, our indolence in recognizing facts, and in drawing the correct deductions, loosen bonds which should never be dissolved, and tighten restrictions which irk without uniting. We are tolerant of such grave lapses as intermarriage and the disuse of the Hebrew language in prayer, and we set undue value on the distinction between trifa and kosher. A very little logical thought,,a single sitting of a conference, would speedily lead to a philosophic reconstruction of the tenets of Judaism. That ' there arose not a prophet since hke Moses ' does not rob later prophets of all their glory, and we who cheerfully accept the benefit of their hard-won victories should be the last to deny them their rightful issue in reform. Our present attitude is unreason- able and harmful in the extreme. We enjoy the social advantages of emancipation and liberty ,but we retain unchanged the antiquated sociological system. We refuse to correlate facts, and to see life steadily and whole. We 90 PRACTICAL JUDAISM are none of us ' orthodox ' in the fullest sense of the term, but we lack the common courage to collect and collate our convictions, and to codify them as reform. In other words, it is time to recognize what I described above, speaking of the Levitical precepts, as their ' differences in space, a nearness and a re- moteness in respect to their distance from the goal'. By requiring our liberties from the nations, we implicitly repealed some of the ordinances which kept us aloof. Acts of Parliament commonly conclude with a formal clause of revocation, essential to the validity of the new code. The charter won by the heroes of the removal of Jewish disabilities requires for its complete vahdity the formal repeal of certain sections and sub-sections of earlier legislation. Which these are should be a matter of general consent, not, as now, of personal opinion. One word must be added for completeness. I have urged in these chapters on practical J uda- ism two seemingly contrary arguments : first, the duty of observance ; and, secondly,the duty of reform. But, the parodox notwithstand- II. LIFE AND LAW 91 ring, I am convinced that, on any other method except the fashionable one of ' muddling through', the contradiction is apparent, and not real. Any sound attempt at reconcilia- tion — the proposition can be stated quite generally— between experience and the God- idea, which move in different planes of under- standing, must take account of two percep- tiohs : one, the nature of religion ; and, two, its function at the present time. These are the universal and the particular, out of which truth is quickened. If legal Judaism, so-calledj could be proved to lay fetters on the intellect, Iby all means let rationalism release it. But if its conservation, as I beheve, conserves liberty of thought, and if no system of thought attains to the height of freedom without providing for the expression of the religious mood, then, always presuming an inteUigent apprehension in the patient, a conservative attitude towards re- Ugion promotes the free use of the mental facul- Ities. That Judaism encourages this attitude by its own historical tact — I can find no more suitable word — the following considerations will help to show. Philosophers treat liberty as Cassar treated 92 PRACTICAL JUDAISM ancient Gaul ; they divide it into three prov- inces—political, moral, and Intellectual. With the standard of political freedom which the Old Testament upholds, we are not immediately concerned. As a fact, the authors of certain passages have little to learn from England as to the nature and boon of free political insti- tutions. It will be enough to refer to the cove- nant, for instance, which the God of Exodus made with the children of Israel ; to Exodus, xix, 4, 5, 6 : 'Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto Myself. Now, therefore, if you will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people ; for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.' Or Numbers, xi, 27, 28, 29 : ' And there ran a young man, and told Moses, and said, Eldad and Medad do prophesy in the camp. And Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of Moses, one of his young men, answered and said, My lord Moses, forbid them. And Moses said unto him, Art thou envious for my sake ? Would God that all the Lord's people were I II. LIFE AND LAW 93 I i prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them.' This is something of what Spinoza meant by the Hebrew theocracy, the state of government in which piety and patriot- ism, divine law and human law, were indistin- guishable ; the state of religious and political existence in which the ideal of liberty was best realized because the true and the false, the legitimate and the illegitimate, fas and ne/as in every department of thought and action, were clearly marked off from each other by unmistakeable differences. The evildoer was at the same time a fool ; he had no excuse for wrongdoing ; Uberty was like the air he breathed ; it was necessary while it was free. This theocracy disappeared. History built a wall which shut us out from the enjoy- ment of the political province of Old Testa- ment liberty. Our dispersion among other nations throws us back with a stronger attachment to the other provinces of freedom, the provinces which do not require territorial conditions for human appropriation and enjoy- ment. If one organ is atrophied, the others become keener and more vivid ; if the pohtical liberty of the Jews, qua a Jewish institu- 94 PRACTICAL JUDAISM tion is an unwTitten chapter of history, and for practical purposes a dead letter, the moral and intellectual provinces acquire a greater interest and power. Our title as a free people rests upon these, not on that ; these are our title-deeds of liberty ; this is the banner which we hold up in the van of civilized peoples. For, obviously, the degree of freedom which we enjoy in civil and national life is regulated by other laws than the Jewish. Its foundation is in Roman Law and not in the Mosaic Code ; and unless we can show that our degree of moral and intellectual freedom entitles us to claim our place among the nations that dare to love liberty, we have no independence worth fighting for. The Prophets did not live too early to see the force of this argument. It is to them that we turn and to the authors of the psalter for that defence of intellectual liberty which we require to-day. Professor Lazarus — audi am glad to have his authority for what I wish to prove — speaks in one place of the Exodus from Egypt, and of the ethical significance which that event assumed in various epochs of Jewish history, The example is particularly instructive 1 II. LIFE AND LAW 95 ^V cause the Exodus was itself a liberation and a working example of the theory of liberty. ' Even in the Pentateuch ', says Lazarus, ' ethical teachings are connected with Egyptian reminiscences. There it is the memory of the sojourn in Egypt, the condition of the people as aliens and as an oppressed class, that is used as the vehicle of ethical com- mands, especially to dispose the people to justice or gentleness towards the stranger, to mildness and magnanimity towards the downtrodden, For ye know well the spirit of the stranger.' There is the lesson of Egypt as applied by national Israel to less fortunate peoples than himself. When the national power was broken, and the national consciousness survived as a kind of spiritual and intellectual sanction, a new meaning or moral was read into the story of the Exodus. ' The Prophets and Psalmists ', says Lazarus, 'employ the great historical event to give reality chiefly to the religious idea of God's provi- dence and grace. The Rabbis finally de- duce from it the two fundamental elements of man's ethical education : the notion of liberty ^^ and the notion of man's ethical task. PoHtical ^ g6 PRACTICAL JUDAISM and even civil freedom was lost. . . . Yet the notion of liberty, inner moral and spiritual liberty, cherished as a pure, exalted ideal . . . was associated with thememory of the redemp- tion from slavery.' And later on he says, ' the sacrificial cult common to all was re- placed by a purer, more spiritual divine service, and by firmer religious laws, symbol at once of ethical obedience, and of the ethical communion.' Thus we see how readily the Rabbis applied the object-lessons of history to the ceremonies of observance and the moral laws of conduct. I return to this invaluable work on The Ethics of Judaism for another quotation appro- priate to my own argument : ' Everybody ', Professor Lazarus says, ' is expected to draw truth from the original sources by the exer- tion of his own strength and at his own peril.' This, if we think of it, is a great saying. ' The Talmud ', he continues, ' makes distinct reference to the fact that later prophets con- tradicted Mosaic words and substituted their own thoughts. The principle stated by Rabbi Simon ben Lakish that " sometimes to annul a law is to estabhsh it ', was properly adopted. r II. LIFE AND LAW 97 Reform — a nfew conception — often furnishes the real justification for a law which, in its earlier shape, has become irrelevant and in- expedient. Reform, therefore, is pre-emin- ently conservative The Judaism of the past presents two doctrinal opinions, in fact, it divided into two opposing ten- dencies. Let us call the one, traditionalism, the other, rationalism. But the latter is to be taken in a most restricted sense, and is as consistently conservative as its antagonistic trend of thought.' In the many phases of the conflict between unilluminated reason and uncharitable im- agination, a religious-minded man might do worse than to take as his motto the maxim of Simon ben Lakish, ' Sometimes to annul a law is to establish it ', with the corollary of Professor Lazarus, ' Reform, therefore, is pre-eminently conservative '. Certainly, if Lazarus is right, there is at least a decent case for a man who ventures to describe himself as a conservative Jew, and who yet deems it consistent to use his reason as well as his memory in the observance of the Divine Law. Such a course admits of real progress in law- B-L.J, H ^m buch i L PRACTICAL JUDAISM ^ making, of positive development : even new laws may arise. . . . This method, consci- ously pm-sued since HiUel's time, was primar- ily calculated to apply the spirit of old laws to completely transformed and newly-arisen conditions ' — just as, I may add in parenthe- sis, the ethical value of the Exodus presented one front to the Jews under Moses, and another to the Jews under the Romans. ' Its scope was enlarged to include ordinances which abrogated a distinct Biblical law, or sanc- tioned its evasion, in order to ensure the fulfil- ment of its spirit and purpose.' Here are chapter and verse for the conten- tion urged above that conservative Judaism re- quires in places the addition of a formal clause of repeal to certain articles in its code. I can- not do more than state the conservative sanction of rationahsm ; do more, that is, than claim a right for the conservative Jew, a right based on his conservatism, to think in religious affairs for himself, and ' to draw truth from the origi- nal sources by the exertion of his own strength and at his own peril'. I am not prepared to say how far my strength would avail in this direction, how much courage a busy life leaves II. LIFE AND LAW 99 ^rme to enter on this perilous quest ; nor yet, from the other point of view, to what extent I prefer, with a conscious shrinking from such a trial, to rest on the bosom of tradition, and to accept the direction of the past for my conduct in the present. My personal sentiment in this connection is immaterial to the argument. My plea is this : Traditionalism and rational- ism are two facets of the same jewel, twin elements in conservative Judaism. Memory and reason, in simpler words, are both essen- >tial to an intelligent and a living faith. Per- sonally, I may think that the former element is more important on the public side of the creed, which must by its nature be preserved in a form which is partly a compromise, and that the reasoning element belongs to private conduct and belief : but really the two coal- esce at so many points that it is unwise to insist on a distinction. Each age has its own conventions. To each in turn is addressed the warning against a blind acquiescence in the things of men who are their own witnesses, ' They have not known nor understood ' ; of each in turn it is true ' that he cannot PRACTICAL JUDAISM ^ ledge, the liberty of reason, is wanting, till each man shall say of his own eidolon : ' Is there not a lie in my right hand ? * Finally, the relations of law to life demand a fearless and an uncompromising honesty. The springs of reUgion reside in the rocky fast- nesses of character, not in details of observance . Sham, mockery, and humbug are comparatively easy to detect ; but there is a specious parade of piety — a kind of external conformity — which expresses no real feeling, and the colours of which do not penetrate the surface. The preacher must constantly be confronted with this problem ; he inveighs from the pulpit against absentee seatholders, but he is consci- ous all the while that many of the absent have more title to the religious life than some of his regular congregants. I need not discuss this paradox, beyond expressing my conviction that, if religious observances are properly founded on the religious sense, such distinc- tion between God's rehgious man and man's religious man will tend to disappear. In for- mer times and in other churches the arti- ficiality of observance was fostered by elabo- rate schemes- of vena] ' dispensations'. It is II. LIFE AND LAW loi our business to reduce to a vanishing point the possibility of artificialness, by making religious observances as natural as possible an^expression of the religious mind. Train the mind to apprehend and to appreciate the beauties of Jewish thought and the value of Jewish beliefs, and trust, even unto seventy times seven, that the fault lies in the training if the expression prove halting or inadequate. Aim high ; sanctify ceremonies by idealism^ and prove ideals by ceremonialism. The Hebrew, like Jacob at Luz, discovers God in unexpected places. His religion is a conse- cration of the commonplace. CHAPTER IV Jew and Gentile I. In the Past No account of the Jewish rehgion, no attempt to guide or to mark its stages of development, can neglect the social side of the history of the Jews. They are represented to-day, on a moderate computation, by more than eleven million survivors of nearly two thousand years of persecution. The calculation is reached as foUows : The latest statistics of Jewish population put their number at 11,167,654, and the twenty centuries of persecution are made up by the 1906 years now complete in our calendar, with an allow- ance for the oppression of the Romans prior to the commencement of the civil era, while the Russian atrocities of the present Century preclude, it need hardly be added, any deduction from the total at this end of the scale. w I. IN THE PAST 103 In the first place, the mere existence of the Jews—apart from their numbers and their influence — is a fact in * ethology ' of the utmost interest and importance. By every known law of history this unfortunate people should have been crushed out of existence several centuries ago. They have lacked even the first of the conditions which have favoured the survival, say, of the negroes in America. They have nowhere been an aboriginal tribe, gradually suffering displace- I ment by the overgrowth of a more highly I civilized community. They have never possessed the condition or instinct of nation- ality supplied by the sense of a common lan- guage and soil, which accounts, as in Norway and Hungary, not merely for the survival but for the revival of nations. Scattered and driven, as they have always been, ex- pelled even from England under Edward I, and excluded to a certain degree under Edward VII, the Jews have clung to corporate existence with a baffling tenacity, and have exhibited in every age and country an extra- ordinary faculty for constructing on the barest basis of toleration a firm and an eminent L 104 JEW AND GENTILE stronghold. Take the annals of their history where we will ; we shall find that it follows the same course, through oppression, perse- cution, and ostracism, to secret or overt power. Take, as a typical instance, the annals of the Jews in France. There were Church laws against the Jews as early as a.d. 465, and within the next hundred years the Mero- vingian Councils forbade Jews to be judges or tax-collectors, or to exercise any civic or administrative rights over Christians, unless they had been previously baptized. The Jews might not appear in public during Holy Week, nor walk before ecclesiastics, nor con- vert or torture Christian slaves. In a.d. 629 King Dagobert proposed to drive from his domains all Jews who would not accept Christianity. In the Carlovingian period the Jews were again numerous in France, but their position was regulated by law. Their commercial importance may be gathered from the fact that Isaac the Jew was a mem- ber of Charlemagne's embassy in 797 to the Court of Haroun-al-Rashid, and King Louis le Debonnaire at the beginning of the ninth I. IN THE PAST 105 ^P century took the Jews under his protection with special reference to their position as merchants. The next three centuries wit- nessed the transformation of French society under the development of the feudal system and the organization of trade-gilds. Both ^L lines of progress proved oppressive to the ^P Jews, inasmuch as they contained the ele- ments of greed and exclusiveness which subsequently found expressionin the religious crusades. French Judaism and Franco- Jewish culture flourished despite these con- ditions. The Rabbinical schools rendered learning illustrious, and a line of scholars and poets led up to the famous names of Gershon, the ' Light of the Exile ', and Rashi of TroyeSj in whom is personified the genius of northern French Judaism. ' Thenceforth ', in the words of Professor Gottheil of Columbia University, ' French Judaism becomes one of the poles of universal Judaism ''. The story of the intervening centuries need I not detain us in detail. In 1096 the heroes of First Crusade shut up the Jews of Rouen in IS nails) ' See The Jewish Encyclopedia (Funk and Wag- l-nalls), s.v. France, io6 JEW AND GENTILE a chxirch, and put them to the sword with( distinction of age or sex. In the time of the Second Crusade a grandson of Rashi was among the victims of its zeal, and it is especi- ally noticeable for the purpose of thischaracter- study that two terrible legacies were be- queathed to the Jews of Europe by these two crusading expeditions. The first was the charge of ritual murder, and the second was the trade of usury. Each is directly to be traced to the same historical cause. Macaulay's schoolboy is aware that King Richard I of England was unable to get home till an enormous ransom had been paid for him ; and generally, it may be said, that the soldiers and adventurers who set out for the Holy Land were obliged to raise money for their daily necessities as well as for the exigencies of warfare. The easiest course was to go to the Jews — in a phrase which has become proverbial — and to change solid Jewish merchants, pursuing an honour- able and a useful livelihood, into miserable usurers, demanding exorbitant rates of in- terest for loans which they did not wish to lend, and for which they could take ] e no^^ ^m security, murder : I. IN THE PASt t07 And as to the charge of ritual here were the soldiers of the Cross, thirsting for blood and adventure, and bound ■ for Jerusalem on a quest which aroused the worst passions of fanaticism, and there were the descendants of the people who had crucified the Christ. What better excuse could they seek for extorting money at the sword's-point ?, and in what more likely flesh should they baptize their dedicated steel ? This summary does not wholly account for the evil qualities of the Jews ; still less must it be taken to contain or convey the whole history of the Crusades. At the most, it suggests some effects produced on the char- ■ acter of the Jews, not merely in France, but in other countries from which the Crusaders were drawn, or through which they passed, . in that epoch of ignorant superstition, of harsh use of physical superiority, and of law- lessness only checked by fear. Two invari- able factors contributed to the same result : the one was the separateness of the Jews, I rendering them liable to all kinds of suspicion ; and the other was the high moral and mental standard which tended to make them the io8 JEW AND GENTILE objects of jealousy and hate on the part the majority from whom they held aloof. These seeds, then, were sown early. The oppression by rods in France was a scourge of scorpions in Germany. About 12,000 Jews are said to have perished by massacre in the Rhenish cities alone between May and July, iog6. The crimes of ritual murder, of dese- cration of the Host, of poisoning the wells, and so forth, were freely imputed to them ; and rumours once set afoot were more difficult to arrest then than now, more particularly as the channels of information would be closed to contrary statements. Popular feeling was inflamed, and no accusation was too wild to find its acceptance and its consequences. The Black Death was ascribed to the Jews in the middle of the fourteenth century, and caused another general slaughter throughout the provinces of Gerraany. The'record of slaughter and expulsion dur- ing the Middle Ages, the attempts to solve the Jewish question by extermination, may be stated categorically : in 1096 there were massacres of the Jews by the Crusaders on a large scale at Metz, Spiers, Worms, Mayence ^ he P (w I. IN THE PAST 109 I (where the slain are said to have numbered over a thousand), Cologne, and its neigh- bouring villages, Treves, Regensburg, and other Rhenish cities. When these Crusaders reached Jerusalem in July, logg, they sig- nahzed their success by driving all the Jews of that city into one of the synagogues, and there burning them alive. The Second Cru- sade in the middle of the twelfth century was also marked by Jewish persecutions in various parts of western Christendom ; and every Englishman is aware that, in September, 1199, when Richard I was starting for the Third Crusade, his followers, assisted by the populace, attacked the Jews of Stamford, Bury St Edmunds, Colchester, and other ^M towns, while in York, on the following March ^P 16th, a hundred and fifty Jews of all ages, with their Rabbi at their head, killed them- selves in order to escape slaughter or baptism. It has been correctly remarked that economi- cally and socially alike the Crusades were disastrous for the Jews of Europe, and we I note that after their date there begins that series of expulsions of the Jewish communi- ties from various countries, among which may JEW AND GENTILE be mentioned the exodus of 16,000 Ji from England under Edward I ; the well- known exodus from Spain under Torquemada, by whom it was said that at least 2,000 Jews had been burnt at the stake, and whose record in other respects as the head of the Grand Inquisition adds a painful chapter to the history of his peninsula ; the expulsion from France in 1182, and the second expulsion from that country in 1306, followed by a third in 1394, as well as Germany's record, which included the expulsion from Silesia. Thus, it may fairly be said that history from early in the Middle Ages gave the Jews a bad name, and it is equally fair to add that the responsible makers of history — the Idngs and statesmen of the succeeding centuries— con- tributed very powerfully to the aim of mak- ing the Jews live down to the bad name that had attached to them. There are certain native Jewish character- istics which tend to make them less than thoroughly good citizens. By their observance of a separate Sabbath, and by the Levitical precepts which required them to abstain from certain foods, and only to eat others ] I. IN THE PAST ^P prepared in a particular way, the Jews earned a reputation for holding aloof from their fellow- men, not merely in their rehgious devotions, »'but also to some extent in their social inter- course. The strict law against the inter- marriage of Jews with Gentiles has, of course, contributed to this result. These tendencies may be said to grow less, according as the country in which the Jews reside maintains a liberal attitude towards its inhabitants, of whatever denomination. But the policy of European rulers in the centuries succeeding to the Crusades was diametrically opposed to this enlightened principle. They pent the Jews into Ghettoes where every separatist instinct was bound to develop itself to the utmost extent of its power, and then they issued manifestoes and State papers accusing the Jews of holding aloof from their fellow- men. I Mr Israel Zangwill's imagination has recon- structed the Ghetto-Ufe, and helps us to realize the sentiments of its inhabitants- He writes that its ' gates were closed at midnight and opened in the morning, unless it was the Sabbath or a Christian holiday, when they t \ 112 JEW AND GENTILE remained shut all day, so that no Jew could go in or out of the court, the street, the big and little square, and the one or two tiny alleys that made up the Ghetto. At night the watchmen rowed round and round its canals in large barcas, which the Jews had to pay for'. But one day it happened that a child found his way out of the Ghetto, and Mr Zangwill describes the ' wonder and perturbation ' which woke in him at the sight of the most ordinary scenes of the city of Venice in which this sketch is placed. The whole of this story, which only occupies a few pages of The Dreamers of the Ghetto, is itself a remarkable character-study, for it points the significance^not merely for one small child of the Ghetto, but for genera- tion after generation of Jews who were bom and bred within the area of those sealed gates— of that forcible exclusion from the gfil and movement and progress which the outside world was making. To describe these centuries of Jewish history as a period of imprisonment within a Ghetto, chequered by spasms of hate which led to massacre and torture, is doubtless an exaggeration ; 1 I. IN THE PAST "3 ^Bs studjnng the character of the Jews con- siderable weight must be given to those years of extraordinary experience, when, with intellects above the common, and with every ability to take part in the drama of human affairs, they were subjected to the severest bondage, both of body and of soul. In the years when society as a whole was released from the trammels of feudalism, and moved steadily towards a degree of inde- pendence and self-assertion, the tendency of the treatment meted out to the Jews was towards segregation, dependence, and that particular psychological condition which is described as self-involution. It should be possible at this stage to dis- ^kcover and to give names to a few, at least, of the ^r characteristics which the Jews of the European Ghettoes would be hkely to have acquired when the time came for their emancipation. The first and most obvious of these is the quality of narrowness. A narrow sky and narrow streets produce inevitably the effect of narrowing the mental horizon and the emotional compass of those who are thus I restricted. With this narrowness there ^^ restnctec L 114 JEW AND GENTILE would go a large degree of self-absorption. Shut in with their own interests, and shut out from the movements of the world without, the Jews would be compelled more and more to rely on their own resources, and to develop in an intense degree the possibilities open to them within the limits imposed by the Ghetto walls. The schools of commentators and Talmudists which grew up within those walls carried the study of their texts to the utmost limit of pedantic scholarship. They teased and worried it into anagrams and acrostics for lack of those vivifying influences which dwellers outside the walls received, as it were, through the pores of their skin. If we could imagine a Baconian fanatic shut up in a Shake- speiaran library, not merely for the term of his natural Hfe, but through the lives of generations of his descendants, and can con- ceive the use to which he would put this enforced study of his subject, we shall have some idea of the labour bestowed by the Jews of the Middle Ages on the interpretation and annotation of the works of their own religion. Again, and in the same context, while traders outside the Ghetto were constantly I. IN THE PAST 115 Blirought into contact with the wider ideas derived from the discoveries of geographers, of astronomers and explorers, so that even if they were engaged in trader-one might say especially if they were engaged in trade— their business would be filled with romantic possibilities, and would touch at every point the fringe of romantic adventure, Jewish men of business on the contrary were restricted to the ugliest side of that business of exchange. They missed its more ennobling and inspiring aspects, and had little or no cause to regard it from any higher standard than that of the ledger and the scales. A third characteristic which was certain to be developed under these conditions is that of fear, with its close ally cunning. Even when the fear of actual physical persecution was removed, or was at any rate so occasional as to be negligible for years together, the Jews were constantly oppressed by the yet more humiliating fear of giving offence, of being laughed at, and of being spat at ; and this fear which was carried about with them by day and by night would surely induce a tning and a cringing attitude towards ii6 JEW AND GENTILE those who had it in their power to make the conditions of Ghetto life even more intolerable than they were. Somewhat akin to this last characteristic would be that of assimilative- ness. The fear of drawing attention to them- selves by being different from others would lead them to try to escape attention by becoming like others in external things. The Jew may be said to be naturally dramatic, and his adaptiveness, of which we hear and see very much at the present day, may, in all probability, be traced to this eagerness to assume the colours of his environment in order to assist his struggle for survival. Another characteristic which, whether natural or not, must certainly have been intensified by the experience of the Middle Ages, is the acquisitiveness of the Jews. It may be that they have a native prejudice in favour of surrounding themselves with the best of material things, but this tendency, which might have been corrected under happier conditions, could not but have been developed to the utmost of its capacity in these uncom- fortable Ghettoes. The Jew who got on best, who became most powerful in a worldly n luiy I. IN THE PAST 117 H sense, was most likely to have the acerbities of his lot alleviated and to win a position of contemptuous toleration when his business » brought him into contact with the big men of the city outside. There is another characteristic, perhaps entirely due to the effects of historical environ- ment. The soUdarity of the Jews is a phrase which was very freely used at the time of the agitation about the aliens. In seeking the cause of this soHdarity, which is an un- doubted factor in Jewish life, one tends to forget that, historically, it is by no means a quality which one would expect to find. The Jews have no common soil, no common spoken language, and hardly a common religion, so different are the aspects of that religion in various countries, and in various sections of those who practise it. Moreover, the self-interest of the Jews is all against their hanging together, and all in favour of their adopting the poUtics and prejudices of the country in which they reside. Yet so strong is the tradition set by the common interests of the Ghetto that Jewish soHdarity , is a more marked characteristic to-day than ■ is a ii8 JEW AND GENTILE the self-interest of scattered communities of the Jews. The question plainly arises in an unpre- judiced mind ; how has it happened that, with every historical cause for extinction, and with every cause for the development of the Jews into a race as black as their enemies paint them, they have yet had a force within themselves which has enabled them not merely to survive, but to exhibit virtues and capacities which qualify them to take a leading part in whatever country their lot may fall ? The great corrective in the Jewish character which was not due to historical environment, though it was intensified by the conditions of that environment, was supplied by the Jew's immense talent and power of idealization. It may safely be said that had it not been for his capacity of abstracting himself from the sordid and painful realities of his existence into the ideal world which every tenet of his faith helped to make actual to his imagina- tion, the Jew would never have survived the experience of hate and humiUation which pursued him through so many centuries. I. IN THE PAST iig This idealizing power operated in the greatest and in the least of his daily habits and happen- ings. The ceremonial of the Jewish religion, as required by the Levitical ordinances, and as elaborated by subsequent and less inspired legislators, was directed throughout to the consecration of the commonplace. Its ob- ject was to endow the least elevated of com- mon duties with a sense of responsibility, and to co-ordinate the whole series of ph3'sical and moral functions under the same category of cleanliness and holiness. Regulations as to food and dress, as to marriage and other social acts, as to worship and other reUgious acts, were all alike intended to famiUarize the Jew with the idea of the omnipresence and the omniscience of the Deity. In the result they served — as indeed they serve to this day — to impart a very special degree of homeUness and affection to Jewish family life. Mr Zangwill, in the story I have men- tioned, relates very cleverly how the blood of the boy seemed to leap when the chant of the ancient scroll trilled suddenly into bird-songs, and this leaping of the blood at the sounds which delighted our fathers H at cne sou JEW AND GENTILE ^ illustrates my meaning here. Each com- mon meal becomes a kind of sacrament ; each family function a kind of religious celebration ; and every religious celebra- tion is marked by a sense of respectful familiarity with the Deity, which strikes an incongruous note on Western notions of decorum. To this world of duties and senti- ments which was ptu^josely filled to the brim by the Rabbis and Talmudists, the Jew of mediaeval Christendom was glad to escape from those who persecuted and contemned him. There he found complete satisfaction for his emotional capacity ; and if, as Matthew Arnold tells us, religion is ' morality tinged by emotion ', it may readily be conceived that the emotional tinge in the religion of the Jew tended to overwhelm the other elements, and to make religion itself merely an expres- sion of the emotions. The Jew did good according to his hghts, not because he was told to do good, still less because he was afraid to do evil, but because he loved good, and because, through the performance of it, and in the performance of it, he was enabled to steep himself in the atmosphere of that I. IN THE PAST H inner world to whichj without regard to his inclination, he was constantly compelled to return by the mere force of external circum- » stances. Thus, broadly speaking, we can follow the Jewish development of character along two main lines of evolution. History made him the craven, the money-grubber, the usurer, the blood-sucker, as he is represented in Russia and elsewhere to-day, and as we meet him in modem works of fiction. But his power of idealization counteracted to a great extent the influence of the harsh reahties of hfe, and must be taken into account in any attempt to estimate the effect on the character of the Jews of the experiences through which they have passed. Without such counteracting influence their survival is inconceivable- At the mercy of the swords of the Crusaders^ racked by the torments and burned by the fires of the Inquisition, despised as ahen, and rejected as unclean, ostracized not merely from social intercourse, but hkewise from industrial and commercial affairs except under conditions which compelled them to earn a livelihood in sordid and mean pursuits, ■ uveal 1 122 JEW AND GENTILE liable to spoliation if they succeeded, and expulsion if their numbers rendered th< obnoxious, or if their poverty rendered them burdensome, or if the State was covetous of their wealth ; driven in tortuous ways and habituated to a cringing attitude, for- feiting their Maccabgean dower of courage by long desuetude of arms — what chance would they have had of maintaining through- out the ages the high standard of living which is the hygienic condition of physical perpetua- tion, or the intellectual ambition which is its spiritual concomitant, if their religion had not taught them hope, pride, and self-con- trol, while their history bred in them despair, humiliation, and self-abasement ? This con- trast may be overdrawn ; the Jewish record in epitome compels the use of strong colours, but I venture to ask — where is the down- trodden race to-day which the history of the Jews should have produced, a race more deeply sunken in ignominy than the negroes of America ? Where are the pessimists and negationists whom that experience should have produced on the intellectual side ? And, failing these products, how else ' else t^^m T. IN THE PAST I we to account for the Jews as they are except by the operation of a force within themselves stronger than the forces which sought to crush them, and stronger yet through the suffering ■ induced ? P A German historian has said, in language which sears the conscience of students of history : ' The Christians themselves bound the rods with which Jewish usurers have scourged them '.' The epigram sums up effectively the considerations here advanced, and partly to the same cause may be ascribed the characteristics which the Jew exhibits when he is released from his Ghetto. For we have to account for the Jewish character as it is displayed to-day, with its curious contrasts of an infinite capacity for self-sacrifice and an infinite love of self-display ; a material vulgarity which offends the ears and eyes of decorous occidental neighbours, and a spiritual sublimity which — measured even by the en- tries in the pass-books of the bank of charity — touches a height unequalled by disciples K of the Gospel. In this connection I may I ' Die ^H zeknten J ' Die geisiigen und sozialeti Slromungen des neun- zeknien Jahrhunderts. By Professor Ziegler. 124 JEW AND GENTILE urge that emancipation and equal rights new toys for the Jews, and they play them like children. The gross materialism which strikes the outside observer is likely to yield to time when the toys become familiar. It is impossible to believe that the force which sweetened and transmuted the experi- ence of hate and persecution should lose its efficacy in the face of the opportunities offered by prospterity. That the Jew should be an idealist through ill-fortune, and a materialist in goodj is against the laws of human character, as illustrated throughout his strange history. It is the novelty which betrays him into flaunting his new possession at all seasons and in all places. Remember that barely sixty years have passed since Macaulay was throwing the weight of his influence with the Whigs into the scale of the movement for admitting Jews into Parlia- ment. To-day a Jew, Disraeli, has been Prime Minister of England, and added the Imperial title to the British Crown. Another Jew, the late Sir Juhan Goldsmid, has pre- sided over the deliberations of the House of Commons ; and another occupies a post 1 with I ost J^^M r I. IN THE PAST I the Liberal Government of to-day. This alone — to pursue the subject into no more vulgar channels of comparative figures- will indicate the rapidity of the movement associated with the repeal of Jewish disabih- ties in England. The Jew, like Browning's lover, may be said to have two soul-sides. The one which he turns to the world is eager to assert his new independence of the world's toleration and approval. Not for two thousand years or more has the Jew in a Christian com- munity been in a position to say : ' I am as good as you, as free as you, as powerful as you. See, here are the symbols of my equal footing in your world.' But his other side he turns to the near, strange, famihar, exacting, stem but comforting spirit which, like the genius of Socrates, has accompanied the pilgrimage of his race, leading it, as by a fire in the night and a pillar of cloud in the day, through the wilderness of more than three-score generations to the land of promise not its own. And this other soul-side, which he turns to the spirit of his race, is, we doubt not, as meek, as brave, as confidentj and as 126 JEW AND GENTILE pure as in the days when he was told are my witnesses, My people whom I chosen.' For this vivid and actual article of the Hebrew creed, in whose light, as their Rabbis teach them, all their arrogance is ignorance, has resisted throughout the ages the attacks of time and chance ; has helped the ship of the Ark to survive the perils of persecution, and Lhe worse perils of assimila- tion, and has contributed its noteworthy share to that complex historical product, the modern Jew. Let us hear at this point how he strikes some of his contemporaries. Mr Arnold White, who poses as the candid friend of the Jews, in the evidence which he gave be- fore the Royal Commission on Alien Immi- gration, stated his opinion that the Jews ' not unpopular in certain ways, but they have the reputation among those who are in con- tact with them of crawling, underhand ways. They are not remarkable forcrimesof violence. The knifing is not traced to the Jewish immigrants at all, as far as I can get at the facts; but as regards perjury, lying, and cheating, the evidence of the magistrates, I 1 have I oi be- ^1 ave T I. IN THE PAST 12? ■ think, will produce a great effect on the Commission ' ; and he alleged as the reason for the ingenious cruelty of the Russian anti- Semitic legislation ' the belief which is shared by the educated and uneducated classes ahke in Russia, that if Russia were to open the door of the Pale, and give the Jewish subjects of the Tsar equality before the law, not ten years would pass away before every post of importance in the Empire would either be occupied or controlled by members Lof that race, while the manual labourer and Hthe moujiks would become the serfs of Semitic money-lenders.' Perhaps this ' belief ' is to be taken as the justification of the present atrocities. From other witnesses who gave evidence before the Royal Commission the following pieces of characterization may be selected. The Jews were described by one witness as ' a dirty lot altogether '. Another stated that ' they are dirty, and filthy, and disgraceful in an English country ' ; though he held out the hope that ' We shall turn them from their dirty habits in time ' ; and a third witness, who seems to have had the faculty of looking a Httle below the surface, I faculty of 128 JEW AND GENTILE could find nothing less unfavourable to say than that ' The alien, not very clean at first, soon accommodates himself to local con- ditions. There is, of course, the inevitable residuum who are steadfastly dirty — simply irreclaimable. They get into a hopeless plight, inseparable from squalor and insanita- tion. Some are apparently ignorant of the most elementary needs towards cleanliness. Much of this is due to their busy lives. They habitually make labour their existence, surrendering themselves to the obligations of earning a living. Bed to work, and work to bed, theirs is truly a mechanical life. It cannot altogether be wondered at that they neglect and ignore the very essentials of a decent existence.' I have tried to show the essential contra- diction between the character of the Jews as here represented, according to the best knowledge of their neighbours and oppressors, and the character which belongs to them by the inalienable right of heredity and of descent. The histories of Josephus give us a very different idea of the qualities which the Jews displayed while they enjoyed indepen- I. IN THE PAST lag dence, and in those early years of terrible experience when they were fighting for that independence against tremendous odds. And the subsequent history of the Jews, as told by Graetz and others, will be found to reilect what Walter Pater in another context called ' a wild Hght breaking on their graves '. In those annals wiU be found example after example of heroic endurance, of patience ten times refined by the fire of persecution, of devotion to religion in a sense hardly con- ceivable in these days. For the religion of the Jews in past ages meant to them not merely the promise of a heaven far off, but their home in the present, and the actual promise of a Messiah who might arrive in any age, and who, in fact, was welcomed in more than one false appearance by that people, ever hopeful, ever trustful, ever confident that their sufierings and their sacri- fices were but milestones on the road to Palestine, and that they were only repeating the experiences of their forefathers in Egypt, and slowly accumulating the bricks which should build them the third temple of their ^^reams. ^M ILL.J. 130 JEW AND GENTILE There are those among them to-day who are devoting the best part of their lives to the reaUzation of those dreams. Mr ^angwill, Mr Lucien Wolf, and others are actively associated with a movement which is known as the Jewish Territorial Organization. It has attracted the sympathy of men as diverse in their tastes as Mr Chamberlain and Mr Holman Hunt, and^ whatever my personal sympathies may be, whether or not I believe that it is practicable or desirable to draft the Jewish fugitives from South-Eastern Europe into a far-off colony where the}- are to fend for themselves, I may yet claim that this scheme would never have entered into the region of practical pohtics if the only sur- viving qualities of the Jews were those which they had acquired in the course of their historical experience. If this were the end, if the prosjjerous Jews of Western Europe were as prone to materialism, or if the Jews in adversity in the South-East were as deeply degraded as contemporary history would have us believe, then Mr Zangwill and supporters would be crying in the void, the Jewish Territorial Organization would his I and I I r. IN THE PAST 131 " the shadow of a name, as ineffective and unreal as the Pantisocracy of a hundred years ago. If history had said the last word on the character of the Jews they would never have produced in the last decade of the nineteenth century a Zionist leader of the type of Theodor Herzl, who was afire with enthusiasm for their national regeneration, and who burnt out his short Hfe in the ardour of that dream. For the Jews are to-day, as ever, a great ethical paradox, and I may fitly conclude my attempt to point this paradox with a quotation from Carlyle, who writes of his Hero as priest : ' How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into practice, and at what point our impatience with their non-in- troduction ought to begin, is always a question. I think we may say safely, Let them introduce themselves as far as they can contrive to do it. We will praise the Hero-priest, who does what is in him to bring them in, and wears out in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble hfe, in his endeavour to make a God's Kingdom of this Earth.' RESENT 133 •int of view, whereas I am conscious is to clarifying process of o gain, assistance in ions to be decided. .L' questions in the first jainted intimately enough Juestion from the outside jstion, as it presents itself of the Roumanian Govern- ■Ash Question, as it appears .ages and towns; the Jewish .t is interpreted by the Chau- momic Germany, by the priest- jts of France, by the Nationalists dent Empire which is ruled by the i, perhaps, the wisest Prince in These facts of modern Jewish unfortunately beyond disguise. mark the evil nearer home. he, if we hesitate to admit it, that n English-speaking country which iie proud name of Liberty on the lendent coinage that it issued — the tates of America — there is in force lour a social ostracism of the Jews, i CHAPTER V Jew and Gentile II. In the Present This chapter, unlike the one before, is ad- dressed to Jews rather than to Gentiles. The Jew's relationship to his environment was decided in the past by forces outside of his control. Their present relationship is largely in his own making, and it requires a certain amount oi courage for one member of the religious and social democracy of the Jews to discuss how it should be made. Let me therefore say at once that I am writing without responsibility except to my- self alone. Modern Judaism in relation to the State means, in a sense, ourselves in relation to our neighbours . But it might be mistaken to mean the rest of the Jews in relation to my neighbours ; the difference being that in the latter case I should be assumed to arrogate to myself the invidious position of offi Jmn^J n. IN THE PRESENT 133 advice from a detached point of view, whereas the chief desire of which I am conscious is to submit my ideas to the clarifying process of expression, and so to gain assistance in determining the questions to be decided. For what are these questions in the first place ? We are acquainted intimately enough with the Jewish Question from the outside — the Jewish Question, as it presents itself to the ministers of the Roumanian Govern- ment ; the Jewish Question, as it appears in Russian villages and towns ; the Jewish Question, as it is interpreted by the Chau- vinists of economic Germany, by the priest- ridden patriots of France, by the Nationalists of the decadent Empire which is ruled by the oldest and, perhaps, the wisest Prince in Europe. These facts of modern Jewish politics are unfortunately beyond disguise. We may even mark the evil nearer home. We are aware, if we hesitate to admit it, that in the great English-speaking country which inscribed the proud name of Liberty on the first independent coinage that it issued — the United States of America — there is in force at this hour a social ostracism of the Jews, 1 134 JEW AND GENTILE which af£ects the sensitive moral conscicM ness of to-day hardly less painfully than tb" physical persecution of the Middle Ages. And we are aware, though it may not be pru- dent to give it language, that in this Eng- land of ours, which, more than any State of ancient or modem times, has been true to the cardinal points of Imperialism and Freedom, there are gusts and fluctuations of opinion, sudden stirrings of the calmer air, which may be isolated signs, as obscure and irra- tional in their appearance as certain facts of meteorology itself, or they may be pre- monitions of a storm to come — but which in any case give pause to the comfortable complacency of contentment, and remind us, as it is well to be reminded, of that glorious record of our descent which we celebrate every year at Passover. Of all the races and nations of mankind which quarter the arms of Liberty on the shield of their honoxir, none has a better title to that decoration than the Jews. Out of a stifi- necked generation, out of its wanderings in the desert, sprang the meekness of spiritual supremacy and the splendour of political 135 rll. IN THE PRESENT nius, sprang the people which remained a people, united to defend their common good, though they had no territorial possessions, no » temporal institutions of sovereignty, no pleni- potentiaries at foreign courts. The trumpet note sounded by the poet in the ears of his countrymen at the dawn of the nineteenth century, ' We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke, the faith and morals hold which Milton held ', may surely be echoed by us Jews of the language tof Moses and the morals of Isaiah. We, too, have had our Pilgrim Fathers. We, too, are trustees of a destiny which transcends the individual life. And therefore it is well to be reminded, through the individual life, by discomfort or pain or anguish in their several degrees, that the process of Jewish assimV lation can never be complete till the pro- phetic vision is realized : ' Gentiles shall come to thy Ught, and kings to the brightness of thy rising ; ... for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on I thee.' Nothing less than this manifestation can satisfy the people of the Book — no smaller light, no minor prophet. On the altar of no 136 JEW AND GENTILE ice o^^ lower aspiration, to no less exalted a have they ofEered the willing sacrifice dispersion, calumny, and sufEering, This alone, in my opinion, is the right point of view from which the believers in the national idea of Judaism should consent to discuss the destiny of their race. As a be- lieving Jew, I refuse to make shift with any instalment of the harvest, or to accept a con- venient reUef from the present affliction of my people as a dividend in fuU for the joy which they will ultimately reap. As aZionist, in the true sense of one who seriously believes that the preservation of the Jews, in defiance of every known law of human ethnology and history, has a meaning which is itself a trust, and who marks with how invariable a purpose the local assimilation of the Jews is time after time arrested by a fresh outbreak of anti- Jewish feeling, which throws them back upon themselves in the moment of their greatest peril from the insidious spread of prosperity — as a Zionist in this sense, I regard with pro- found distrust that attempt to adapt our national idea to the temporary economic requirements of the various States of Christ) irist^^H II. IN THE PRESENT 137 I dom, which has been known during the last few years as ' Political Zionism '. I would say no harsh word of the political Zionists, to whose first leader, Dr Herzl, I paid my hmnble ■ tribute in the last chapter. Up to the hmit P of their convictions, they are sincere and unselfish and well-intentioned. The mischief is that their convictions are not adequate to the cause which they defend. Political Zionism, as an instrument of salvation, is not a satisf jHng culmination to the years of appren- ticeship in the desert. It is a disappointing solution to that mystery of the ages, that inter- minable riddle of history^the survival of Israel in exile — to be told that the end and object of it all is the Judenstaai of Dr Herzl's programme. We cannot call it a Restoration of the Jews to be permitted to draft back our outcast poor to Palestine. Zion is the sym- bol of a larger hope. The ' joy ' must be more commensurate to the ' tears ' . The ideal, if it is worth labouring for at all, must be conceived in proportion to the suffering HOf those who served it by waiting. The new ^KZion must be faithful to the vision of the ypoet : ' Behold, I will extend peace to her » 1 .138 JEW AND GENTILE liife a river, and the glory of the Gentiles a flowing stream. ... As one whom mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.' What is there of this streaming glory, this mother- comfort of Jerusalem, in the spectacle of Israel's self-appointed leaders refusing to obey the Prophet who bade them seek the peace of the city where they dwell, ' for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace ', haggling with a Mahometan Prince for the price of the land in which kings were to come to the brightness of their rising, and drafting into that doomed colony, at the mercy of every revolution in the politics of south- eastern Europe, the pitiable victims of a scheme which is the travesty of Zionism ? We who express these views are reproached with sitting in ease and comfort in England while our co-religionists are being persecuted in Roumania and Russia : the impUed re- proach is illogical and unfair. I do prefer the fleshpots of Egypt to so pusillanimous a surrender of the hope which sustained my ancestors through centuries of oppression, No Jew can reply for himself alone me to t^HH II. IN THE PRESENt m H invitation of the political Zionists. It is not A or B who declines it for his own person or in his own circumstances ; the answer is dic- »tated by the makers of the past to the trustees of the future of Judaism, and, speaking with a consciousness of that responsibility, one may speak without fear of the consequences. Indeed, I would go further, and say that if the true nature of political Zionism — its foundation on a policy of flight and escape, its commercial methods and chimerical state- craft, the measure of its decline from the prophetic ideal, and, I may add, the professed Iirreligion of some of its most prominent adher- ents — if these features could be explained to the limited intelligence of the mass of their followers, who are under the spell of the magic of Zion, I venture to think that large numbers I of them would prefer even the scanty flesh- pots of their particular Egypt — the rigours of an exile such as their forefathers endured — to the alternative proposed to them. Holding these views, we shall justly con- clude that the first obligation incumbent on modem Jews towards the country to which 140 JEW AND GENTILE unexceptional loyalty. They should a^ every risk of creating the impression that loyalty which they yield is conditional on their obtaining a state of their own. This apprehension was sincerely entertained by some honest chin-chmen in England at the time of the debates on the enfranchisement of the Jews in the reign of King WiUiam IV, and it taxed the eloquence of Macaulay to ridicule the idea that ' millennarians ' — the Jews who looked forward to the Zionistic millennium — should on that account be ex- cluded from Parliament and office. As long as the hope of Zion is postponed to an era as remote as the dream of human perfect ibiUty, there is nothing to prevent us from fulfilling our duty as citizens ; but as soon as that hope is transferred into the material province of purchase and treaty, the question of Jewish patriotism must be seriously reviewed, especi- ally in countries which extend to the Jews a not too willing hospitality. We may con- tinue to pray that the restoration may be brought about in our own time ; indeed, should count no public service complete whi did not include that prayer. But for 1 ir. IN THE PRESENT 141 » H poses of practical citizenship, we must take our fate as we find it ; and, whether in Eng- land or America, whether in Roumania or France, we must build our houses and dwell in them, and seek the peace of the city where we dwell. Occasions will sometimes arise when a con- flict of duties will present itself, when it will be hard to steer an even course between the dual claims of Judaism and patriotism. In the East End of London, and, in a less degree, everywhere throughout England, the elements of such a conflict exist in the controversy about alien immigration. Without referring to the evidence as to the administration of the law, and without examining here and now the various statistics and figures, it will hardly be disputed that those who are all ahke descended, in whatever generation, from aUen immigrants into England, feel a natural sympathy with victims of harsh treatment in other countries who are following in the footsteps of our forebears. But that sym- pathy, if we are true Englishmen, is tempered by a just appreciation of the economic con- ditions of our own country ; and if these I m OltK nun^^^ 142 JEW AND GENTILE conditions require that the tide of alien gration, whether owing to the too great bers of the immigrants, or to their state of too great destitution, or to the defective pohce supervision of the countries from which they arrive, or to any other cause which renders some of them technically inadmissible as residents on these narrow islands — if and when these conditions require that the tide be checked or controlled, we should reflect very gravely before we give our racial sym- pathies the prior claim over our sense of the national need. Happily, these instances of conflict, of weighing one claim against another, arise very seldom in Great Britain, and I am not altogether sure if the infrequency of their occurrence is not in itself a good reason to give preferential consideration to the national claim on this occasion. At least, in showing themselves better Englishmen than the Enghsh in this matter, and in hast- ening to appeal to British standards of succour to the oppressed, Jews should be extremely jealous that they are not open to reproach for im-Engish conduct on other grounds. It may be said that by reclaiming iming ttaj^H 11. IN THE PRESENT 143 B^ionistic ideal from the busy hands of the political Zionists, who would shape it here and to-day to a visible end, we are virtually abolishing it altogether from the region of practical politics ; and there will not be wanting those who add that our postpone- ment is merely a pretext for abandoning the ideal, and that, being well enough oH as we are, we place our millennium in the Greek Kalends. I think we should be on our guard against paying too much attention to cjTiical criticism of this sort. It is very easy to ad- vance, and very difficult to refute in words. But this at least we may urge, that no honest and thoughtful Jew is ever suffered to forget that, at the best, he is but a sojourner in the land. The intermittent recrudescence of anti-Semitism is now so familiar a pheno- menon that it is not fanciful to associate it with that purpose and moral in om* history which can be read between the hnes of Jewish annals. Till the millennium is reached, till our mission is completed, till the era of 2ion recurs — however we may express the pro- position — we shall never be well enough off to say finally, our exile is ended. As long ■ to say 1 144 JEW AND GENTILE as the moral force of prejudice and the physical force of persecution are manifest, we can never hug the comfortable belief that the end of our wanderings has been reached. And as to the remoteness of that end, if faith cannot bridge the distance, we may summon reason to its aid. The face of the world, even in these doubting times, is not so free from the marks of the fingers of Divine Providence that those who clutch at an unconquerable hope should be reckoned fanatic or insincere. Who, for instance, can cross the threshold of St Peter's at Rome, dedicated to the greater glory of the God who is worshipped through half the earth, and not remember that it is built on the site where Nero in his Circus watched the martyrdom of the early Christians ? Who can stand in the Amphitheatre of Titus, and miss the wonderful reflection that the palace of the spiritual Sovereign of Christendom looks down from the opposite hill on that ruined Colosseum where Christians have been thrown to wild beasts ? And if these mir- acles — these surprises of history— have been wrought in a few short centuries, is it unreason- able to believe, apart altogether from ] m faiti^y 11. IN THE PRESENT 145 H that conduct still has its " victories to win " over prejudice and persecution, before the earth which was created for the develop- ment of character has fulfilled its Creator's intention ? Loyalty to the State, accordingly, is by no means incompatible with a sincere belief in the Restoration of the Jews. But while it is necessary to be clear in our own minds as to what we mean by that beUef, and as to why we cannot adapt it to the programme of pohtical Zionism, it is equally necessary, I think, to be clear in our own minds as to what we mean by loyalty to the State. Much interesting evidence was heard by Lord James's Commission, and part of it certainly went to show that the children and grand- children of aUens tend to become ' quite English ' in their habits and their sympathies. One witness, indeed, I recollect, went so far as to suggest that if the Christian and the Jewish Sabbaths could he celebrated on the same day, the whole problem would disap- pear. According to the Vicar of St Jude's, Whitechapel, the Jemsh question in East London would be solved if Christians and 146 JEW AND GENTILE ^ Jews would keep the same day as their Day of Rest. This interesting challenge has not, as far as I am aware, been taken up on the Jewish side ; but it touches at so many points a marked tendency of modem Jewish thought, that we may well consider it in connection with the limits that must be set to our practical loyalty to the State. I con- fess that I regard with apprehension the indications that undoubtedly exist within the Jewish community of a desire to level the barriers that separate the public devotions of Christians and Jews, and we cannot but feel that our own laxity must be somewhat to blame if an Anglican clergyman of Mr Carter's enlightenment and experience can seriously propose that the Jews should adopt the Christian Sabbath as a remedy for an economic evil, which at the worst can be met by extending the operation of local bye- laws. We cannot but feel that it must partly be our own lax Sabbath observance which has prompted this suggestion, with its disproportion between the evil and the cure, on the part of the Vicar of St Jude's, and once more we are reminded that, if Judaism i idaism is ^^h II. IN THE PRESENT 147 H be respected by the State, it must begin by cultivating self-respect. This desire to break down the barriers between the synagogue and the church, or at least between the syna- Igogue and the Theistic chapel, is of compara- tively recent origin, and it comes to-day in so attractive a guise and with such strong authority to back it, that I count it one of the most subtle dangers that threaten the correct relations between modern Judaism and the State. It is no part of our duty as English- »men to abandon the signs and symbols of our religious separatism as Jews ; and this, I take it, is the effect, though it is not primarily the intention, of Jewish services outside the syna- gogue in which experiments are made towards >an external uniformity in the conduct of public worship. Founded in the first instance with the laudable purpose of providing spiri- tual support for those whom, for one reason or another, the synagogue fails to reach, they result in making the difference between a synagogue and a church so imperceptible to ^Lthe eyes, alike of the head and of the heart, ^Bthat the step from the one to the other is very H^Lsily taken ; and no weekly homiletics, I nt in 148 JEW AND GENTILE would venture to urge, however eloquent language and how deeply soever inspired with the true fervour of Judaism, are likely to counteract the visible tendency of such a movement away from the maintenance of the separatism of the Jews. So much stronger is practice than precept. Instead of assimilating the forms of pubUc worship, which are part of the historical tradition and of the factors of unity in Israel, to those of our non- Jewish neighbours, I would keep the differences between a syna- gogue and a church so clear and so distinct as to serve as a warning to trespassers. We are, perhaps, unnecessarily alarmed at the increase in the nmnber of mixed marriages. They are probably not more frequent, and not more perilous in their example, than they have been in former generations. But, consciously or not, the advocates of a form of public worship, which is neither wholly Jewish nor wholly Christian, but a kind of cross between the two, do measurably facilitate the passage from one to the other, and in these days of untrammelled social intercourse and of widespread spiritual tenuity, it is impor II. IN THE PRESENT 149 ^Btant to keep as plain as possible that distinc- tion between synagogue and church which corresponds, as every theologian knows, to an ultimate and a characteristic difference H in the fundamental conceptions of the two V rehgions and in their outlook upon life and death. I would keep that distinction so clear as to deter a non-Jew, for instance, from marrying a Jewess, or a Jew from seeking a non- Jewish wife. Let me interpolate at this point a brief reference to the argmnent which helps to make so many intermarriages, and which may, perhaps, be called the appeal to broad-minded- ness. It commonly asks the question, ' Do we not all worship one God ? ', which it states as the ne plus ultra of religious truth. But in this sense, decidedly we do not ; or, rather, if the theological quibble must be met, the answer is that the world is not yet ripe for that universal revelation, that Christianity and Judaism have been appointed to prepare for its coming, like the friend of the bride- groom in the parable, each according to its light, and that meanwhile the foUowers of ■- Jesus and the followers of Moses take separate ■' Jesus ar 150 JEW AND r.ENTILE roads towards the goal. If any one prefers the other's road let him cross over and use it ; but as engines of human perfectibility each has its set task in the progress of mankind, and neither as yet can say that its work is complete, or that the sanctions by which it regulates conduct have produced among its own adherents such consummate happiness and goodness as to make it a guide to the other. And, again, in this connection, there is the appeal to the good of the State, which is alleged to be benefited in some mysterious way by the intermarriage of Christians and Jews. This argument is adequately met by the researches of statisticians into the history of such unions, for which I may refer to ' the article on ' Births ' in the third volume of the Jewish Encyclopedia. These apostles of universalism are many centuries in advance of their times. Pro- fessor Lazarus acutely writes : ' Israel had to be particularistic in order to formulate and hold up the universal ideal ', and the true Zionists in Israel, the trustees of a civilizing mission which has survived every outrage and assault, though with the progress c 1 II. IN THE PRESENT 151 H mission they relax the particularism here and there, still must count themselves separatists in race and separatists in creed if they are to transmit the trust undiminished to their children. To pull down the barriers between synagogue and church is to merge the difler- Iences of race and creed, and to sell that birth- right for the conventional mess of pottage. It is not right, it is not even expedient, in a kind of access of spurious patriotism, to de- Orientalize our pubUc worship, to make it as uniform as we can with that in the neigh- bouring chapel, and to familiarize the rising generation of Jews with a form and habit of service which alike by its spirit and by its ■ letter will make them strangers in a syna- gogue, and which will not be recognized as synagogal by kinsmen of their blood from » other lands. England and our neighbours do not demand this sacrifice of our religious individuality. As English Jews, to cut our- selves ofE from Judaism and from the Jews of other countries on the plea of becoming & more English in our public worship, seems to B me at least to be patriotism of the kind which H is described as more royalist than the King. 152 JEW AND GENTILE Ls pra^^^H The emancipation oi the Jews was ] cally certain to give occasion for tendend of this kind. But it is a mistake to identify these immature universalist propaganda with the Reform Movement of 1842, which was particularistic from its inception. The Re- formers of sixty years ago saw that the Judaism of the Ghetto had inevitably acquired certain traits and characteristics which were not, in their opinion, desirable in themselveSj which comphcated, instead of simplifying belief, and which were likely to prove burden- some in the new era of civil liberty. These spiritual fathers, accordingly, founded a Jewish synagogue in which the forms o£ public worship were relieved from the accretions of the centuries. They drew their inspiration, if I may say so, from the ' pure well of ' Judaism ' undefiled ', and thus it is not alto- gether strange to discover their descendants to-day in the seats of the orthodox. It falls to many reformers, as to some Radical politicians, to become conservative in old age — with this difference that, even in hot youth, their desire for change was reactionary, and that, having pruned the mediseval over- rll. IN THE PRESENT 153 growth, such desire is appeased. It may be that the time has come for a fresh movement of reform, but it should still be on particu- ' laristic lines. Emancipation would belie its H name if it were incompatible with orthodox ^ Judaism, and Jews in this country, where I their physical freedom is greatest, should now make up their minds as to what is essential tin Judaism ; for when considerations of State seem to demand the sacrifice of essentials in religion, freedom becomes a mockery, to which the Ghetto is preferable. A confer- ence with this object should be welcome to I all, and such a list of essentials would not be very difficult to compile. It would include the Seventh Day Sabbath from evening to evening, as the corner-stone of the Jewish home on which the social system of the Hebrews has been founded. It would include the use of the sacred language in public wor- ship, as the bond of union between Jew and Jew, and partly, too, out of a proper racial pride, that the people who wrote the Bible ^^ should read it in the language of its authors. ^H And such a list would include the prayer ^^M 154 JEW AND GENTILE ultinJ^H and symbolizes our belief in the ultir fulfilment of our mission. Beyond essentials I need not enter here, because these three alone have been attacked, in the modem jargon, as ' un-English ', or ' not up-to-date ', and for their lapse alone, so far, have spiritual pretexts been found by some earnest thinkers in our midst. They, at any rate, cannot be suspected of confusing the spiritual plea with what may be called the argument from national convenience . Rather, their error must be sought in their neglect of the truth of human nature that no universal ideal can prove an effective mentor or a stimulating guide to conduct without particular expres- sion, and that these Jewish forms and cere- monies, accordingly, are as essential to the Jewish ideal as hands to nerves. This is the mistake of such thinkers, but the consequence of their mistake is worse. These apostles of Anglican Judaism — to adopt a familiar and a not inappropriate epithet — will have taken upon themselves a very grave responsibiUty if they divorce the Jewish church in England from the synagogues of the rest of Jewry, and assimilate it in form, and, to some e 155 rIT. IN THE PRESENT substance, to other churches in this country. Israel has always been quickened by great religious ideals, by these its work among the nations must be judged, and pitiful indeed will be the record if history writes against its name : ' This people, which fought for intellectual liberty, became the slaves of national conventions." And here we see through a side-light a single aspect of the Jewish Question as it presents itself to the Jews. Every one naturally shrinks from talking of the pur- pose in his life. He observes an instinctive reticence about his aims and his ideals. He cannot go to and fro boasting of his final hope to leave the world, as the phrase goes, a little better than he found it- By his acts he exalts himself. And what is true of the individual is true of the nation in its degree. We, as Jews, may be moved by dictates of that kind, but it is not for us to say : ' Here we have left our footprint. Here we have practised this virtue. Here we have hved I for this hope.' The eulogy may be left to i others when the work is done. But it would ^ be a false modesty not to note our successes. 156 JEW AND GENTILE Success never spoils any one if it is taken in the right spirit as a means, and not as an end. Thus, a people that believes in itself should sometimes take stock of its achieve- ment, and little sections of the Jews in Eng- land and other countries may fairiy congratu- late themselves on having achieved a minute part of the great civiUzing mission with which they are entrusted as a whole. The contrast between the condition of Jewish society in England in the reigns, say, of Edward I and of the Seventh Edward is an encouragement to the Jewish ideahst who contemplates the problem of Jewish society in Roumania or Russia to-day. He does not regard that achievement as a fixed point or an end ; at most it marks a step on the road towards his ideal. Another step in this infinite progress, though that stiU will be very far from the end, will be marked when other sections of the Jews have won a similar victory over the prejudice and injustice of their neighbours ; and, deeply as we sympathize with their sorrows and their sufferings meanwhile, gladly as we do all we can to alleviate and remove their burden, we are yet ideahsts enough to II. IN THE PRESENT 157 recognize a purpose in it all. It is not a thing to talk about and boast of, nor to flaunt continually in men's faces, but it is a thing to cling to and to live for, and to save us in our relation to the state from the danger of the two extremes — ^poUtical Zionism on the one part and religious Anglicanism on the other. CHAPTER VI The Function of Hebraism : A Lay Sermon A LAY preacher's text should be taken from a source in profane literature, and mine, accordingly, is selected from the nineteenth discourse of Sir Joshua Reynolds : ' It is in art as in morals ; no character would inspire us with an enthusiastic admiration of his virtue if that virtue consisted only in an absence of vice.' The generalizations of Sir Joshua are too sane to be quite modern, and here, where he is inveighing against the type of simplicity * so very inartificial as to seem to evade the difficulties of art', he has happened on a maxim which is, literally, as old as the hills unto which the Psalmist lifted up his eyes. ' Come, children, hearken imto me, I will teach you the fear of the Lord .... Depart from evil and do good. Seek peace, and pursui It'. A LAY SERMON 159 ' It is in art as in morals. The Psalmist and Sir Joshua agree that conduct or painting of so simple a type as to seem to evade the positives of its faculty, does not command esteem. The law of art requires that diffi- culties be met and overcome ; the law of the fear of God requires that evil be confronted and turned back. But if there is a real rela- tion, or even a fortuitous likeness, between the canons of morality and art, then the Psalter and the Prophets should be studied from an aesthetic point of view. Not merely the beauty of their writing as an accident of form, but the beauty of their teaching as a function of design, should then be researched ; and, consequently, much that has been said, and more that has been acted, on the assump- tion of an inherent feud between Hebraism and Hellenism might have to be gainsaid, though it could not be undone. It is in art as in morals — but since Sir Joshua's day the distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism has been treated by both parties with the authority of the prohibited degrees. Art and morals pursue each its own road to per- Ifection, forgetting that Raphael's countrymen ■ fection. 3M^^ i6o THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM adored the Madonna whom he painted, and that Pericles praised the very Greeks — in lan- guage descended straight from the noblest traditions of Delphi — because their aesthetics were temperate and their philosophy was masculine. The present generation might have been spared many sore offences against taste, moral and aesthetic alike, if ugly moral- ity and mimoral art had not widened the breach between the Greek and the Hebrew ideals. The erotic novel of to-day and the commercialized drama, which rests its vulgar appeal on the splendour of its properties and the crudeness of Its sentiment, are not more false to the spirit which should govern modem civilization than the uncompromising mora- lity, whether passively resisting or positively insisting, which alleges that facts are supreme in himian affairs, and that practical reason is the last word which the intellectual emo- tions can state to spiritual faith. Hellenism plus Hebraism would have saved the Jews of Amsterdam from expelling Spinoza ; Hebraism plus Hellenism would save the artistic tem- perament from the pitiful spectacle of genius manifest in its eccentricities. As Professor 'A LAY SERMON i6i • Butcher reminds us, in his Aspects of the Greek Genius : ' It is in the confluence of the Hellenic stream of thought with the waters that flow from Hebrew sources that the main direction of the world's progress is to be sought ', and he adds that one of the problems r of modern civilization is how to harmonize I these tendencies and to combine culture with religion . Thus the scholar tames the reformer, and this is a safer conclusion than that of , Matthew Arnold, for example, who would I have divided the universe and all the atoms that compose it into Hebraists and Hellenists. ' Lord Beaconsfield, treating Hellenic things with the scornful negligence natural to the Hebrew ' — these are the opening words of Arnold's Literature and Dogma — in this re- spect falsely entitled, ' an essay towards a better apprehension of the Bible ' — and his ECuUure and Anarchy returned even more savagely to the charge. But ' it is in art as in morals ', and Sir Joshua Reynolds's maxim may remind us that there is no Hebrew authority for this separation of the streams. There is Hellenism in the Old Testament, as I there is Hebraism in Plato, and those who I I spi Pbel Cu 1 i62 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISl are fortunate enough not yet to have tasted the dehghts of Professor Stewart's edition of The Myths ', may like to sample in this place one or two pertinent sentences from his mas- terly introduction. Thus he tells us ; 'It is good that a man should be made to feel in his heart how small a part of him his head is — that the scientific understanding should be reminded that it is not the Reason — the Part that it is not the whole Man.' And the myth ' appeals to that major part of man's nature which is not articulate and logical, but feels, and wills, and acts — to that part which cannot explain what a thing is, or how it happens, but feels that the thing is good or bad, and expresses itself, not scienti- fically in "existential" or "theoretic judg- ments," but practically in " value-judgments " — or rather " value-feelings." ' And ' I ven- ture to think that the more we habituate ourselves to the influence of the Poets, the better are we likely to receive the message of the Prophets.' And ' the responses of the oracle are not given in articulate language which the scientific understanding can inter- ^ Macmillan, 1905. A A LAY SERMON 163 Fj)ret. . . . Their ultimate meaning is the " feeUng " which fills us in beholding them ; and when we wake from them, we see our daily concerns and all things temporal with purged eyes.' So George Meredith, writing of such a waking in his Meditation under Stars, interprets this feeling in terms beyond the compass of the scientific understanding : Then at new flood of customary morn. Look at her through her showers, Her mists, her streaming gold, A wonder edges the familiar face : She wears no more that robe of printed hours ; Half strange seems earth, and sweeter than her flowers. Is this Hebraism or Hellenism ? is this Poetry or Truth ? and are not the clever shallow critics utterly and miserably at fault when they write of ' the scornful negligence rot Hellenic things natural to a Hebrew ', and of poetry as an elegant recreation, or an anodyne, or as anything less than a difficult pathway to reality ? Thus, as old Sir Thomas Browne wrote, with his rare and humorous judgment, ' thus it is less strange that Homer should Hebraize.' The aesthetic gems of the Old Testament ^unust be sought for and dug out of the moral Ppo< ] i64 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAIS] ore in which they are embedded. I sul the accompanying samples from my own ver" scanty spadework in the Psalter alone, which is enriched with many passages written in the so-called Hellenic spirit, thus traversing the common theory of Israel's paramount sub- mission to twilight and mystic forms of art. Psalm 8, for example, reflects through the mirror of a monotheistic faith the fearless self- confidence of man in the presence of nature. There is first the order of the universe — the Kosmos of the Greeks ; and, next, the free thanksgiving of man rejoicing in his might, which, when it occurs in Sophocles, is des- cribed as characteristically Hellenic. This psalm should be read in connexion with the opening verses of Genesis, where the strophic iteration of the ' goodness ' of the Creator's design, culminating in the splendid melody, ' and God saw everything that he had made, and, behold ! exceeding good ', illustrates the Psalmist's art-perception ; ' O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth.' The idea of ordered freedom, which we owe gladly to the Greeks— though, soci; 1.11 wc un^ m ■ A LAY SERMON 165 W reached only the first stratum of the Attic State — and which finds political expression to-day in our limited monarchy or monarchial republic, with its democratic institutionSj is inherent in such passages of the Psalter as : The Lord shall cut off all flattering Ups, and the tongue that speaketh proud things ; who have said, with our tongue will we pre- vail ; our lips are our own ; who is lord over us ? For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the Lord (xii, 3-5). Let my sentence come forth from thy pres- ence ; let thine eyes behold the things that are equal (xvii, 2). Therefore hath the Lord recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his eyesight. (xviii, 23). More strictly germane to Greek principles of life and art are verses like the following ; Day xmto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge- There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard, (xix, 2, 3.) Many are thy wonderful works which thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are to us- ward. . . . Sacrifice and offering thou didst ■ ^not desire ; mine ears have been opened : ir^^ i66 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM" ... I delight to do thy will : thy law is within my heart (xl, 5, 6, 8). Man that is honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish (xlix, 20). Let the beauty oi the Lord our God be upon us : and establish thou the work of our hands upon us (xc, 17). And I will walk at liberty for I seek thy precepts (cxix, 45). These passages might be multiplied — the whole of Psalm 107 should be added — but enough is quoted to show that, allowing for the difference of language as a means of ap- proach, the Psalmist drew from the contempla- tion of the universe not merely precepts of conduct but canons of the intellect. The reign of order, the consciousness of freedom, the imity of learning, the relation of parts, the dignity of labour, the sanction of beauty — all these conceptions are contained, ex- plicitly or implicitly, in the psalter, and a competent teacher, gifted with a little imagina- tion, could interpret the psalms to his class as aesthetic discipline no less than as moral instruction — as Hellenism and Hebraism com- bined'. Unfortunately, tradition is against • The authority of Sir Philip Sidney, in a passage which has escaped the eagle eye of Mr R. E. Prothero M I ■ ita A LAY SERMON 167 him. Even the language of the psalter, with its classical nature-imagery, as in Psalms 42 and 126, among very many others, is seldom criticized from the point of view of literary value. There is doubtless much to be said in favour of preserving the Bible from secular uses. But ' it is in art as in morals ' ; and culture and conduct might both conceivably be benefited if the aesthetics of morality and the ethics of art were given places in our curricula. This theme, however we approach it, is by no means new. Keat's familiar couplet from the conclusion of his Grecian Urn con- tains a statement of the proposition that the ideal of the good hfe and the ideal of the in his Psalms in Human Life, may be quoted at this point. Writing in 1581 in his Apology for Poelrie, Sid- ney says : ' And may I not presume a little further to show the reasonableness of this word votes, and say that the holy David's psalms are a divine poem ? . . . For what else is the awaking his musical instruments ; the often and free changing of persons ; his notable prosopopeias. when he midteth you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty ; His telling of the beasts' joy- fulness, and the hills' leaping, but a heavenly poesy, wherein almost he showetk himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of Ike mind, only cleared by faith ? ' I venture to italicize the last three lines. ; is ^^™ i68 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM beautiful life are not separate, but one Ruskin's attack notwithstanding, there i: meaning in the identity. You may do good and love beauty without fear of heresy or idolatry. Goodness need not be ugly, nor beauty unmoral. MoraUty and asceticism are not necessarily allies : in the perfect Ufe the moralist is also a hedonist ; even in our present imperfect conditions, he should strive to be an sesthete. There is no essential opposition between the tendencies of thought known as Hebraism and Hellenism. In this connexion I may refer to a recently published under the title of Christ of English Poetry. It consists of the Hulsean Lectures delivered in Cambridge in 1905 by Dr C. W. Stubbs, and it is rather a pity, from a literary point of view, that the author, in revising his lectures, did not prune them more severely of the technical language of the pulpit. The apostrophic ' Ah, young man ! ' and the hortatory ' Seriously do I beg you to ponder this fact', are , it is respectfully submitted, inappropriate to an inquiry dei Gated to Sir Oliver Lodge into ' the witn( of the Poets of England ' as ' the most re] mgm A LAY SERMON 169 F ■ sentativC) the most prophetic, the most clear- sighted, the most deep-hearted men of their time.' For the witness of the poets to the truths reached independently by the authors of the Scriptures is a far larger subject than Bishop Stubbs has attempted to cope with. It is likewise far more important. An inquiry of that range would take no account of Christ or Antichrist in one or other of the religious communities ; it would illustrate the con- ^■sentaneity between profane and sacred writers H in the sphere of the intellectual imagination ; H and if it established that agreement, it would H add evidence of considerable value to the ^ authority of the Bible, which laymen dispute more and more on the plea of its dogmatic bias. I mean this : when the Bible says, ' O »I-ord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name on all the earth ', the ordinary layman's tendency, if he be rationalistically inclined, is to object that the words suggest no conclusion to his I mind and carry no sanction with them, be- cause a Biblical writer is professedly a theist. But if the poets could be called as witnesses to the Bible, and if they be proved, on examin- 170 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM ' ation, to confirm the statements of that Book, the ordinary layman's objection of theological bias would be ruled out of court. Certain other current- negations would suffer under the same rule. The argument against religi- ous instruction, based on the alleged untruth- fulness of the Bibhcal method of presentation, would haveto be extended to cover theEngUsh poets, if the poetic method of presentation were shown to be essentially similar to that of Bibhcal writers. The uncompromising 'conscientious objector', who declares that his children must not learn falsehoods, and that nothing, therefore, must be taught in schools which would not convince the rational intelligence of an average adult— which is not syUogistically demonstrable — would find that his interdict covered fable, fairy-tale, and poetry, as well as the Bible itself ; and the modem Index Exfurgatorius — surely the most remarkable reversal which the whirligig of time has brought about — would include the ' Poets of England ', as well as the authors of Holy Writ, who are ex hypothesi past praying for by the worshippers of I A LAY SKRMON 171 The Bishop would have done good service to the cause of the use of imagination in human affairs — its use, not merely its orna- mental properties — if he had ■ employed his theme of ' the Christ of English poetry ', not so much to extract from Langland, Shakes- peare and Browning passages of more or less direct Christological tendency, as to establish the identity of the approaches to truth chosen respectively by the Bible and by poetry. The Bishop confuses himself in] courageous but hopeless efforts to christianize Shakespeare's humanity, though not the least wonderful fact in the whole complex of that genius is Shake- speare's obvious indifference to the reUgious struggle which was all around him and about him. Dr Stubbs is reduced to telling us as pertinent to ' the Christ of Enghsh poetry ' 'in the age of Elizabeth, that ' If the Christian in Shakespeare was not the real man, we should have expected, at least, that the Pagan would have spoken more frankly. . . . Shakespeare becomes the pro- phet of Christian truth to his age, and a wit- ness, therefore, to Christ and Christianity. . . . Shakespeare's new emphasis on the impor- L tance of the individual man and woman gave I 172 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM to the Christian principle of Individualitya root as deep as the bottom of things, and endowed it with a sovereign authority in history.' AH this may or may not be correct — it is certainly only partially true — but it is not what the lay reader looks for from the title of the book. A volume which should suc- cessfully expand Dr. Stubb's somewhat timid sermons into a genuine survey of the ground common to poetry and religion — how each is the other even in its own despite — would be valuable at all times and invaluable at the present moment. Every religious system, Judaism included, is virtually on trial just now. The criterion of reason is being appUed to it, and the Crichtons of that code are not very tolerant of facts which do not happen to be demonstrable. That there are many facts of this more intangible kind, and that they form to many of us the safest refuge from the uncertainties of human reason, and the only refuge from its errors and its terrors, are, in the opinion of these rationalists, signs — vanishing, they believe — of a weak or of a deranged intellect. But add the poets to the Bible as witnesses to the truths of imagination ; A LAY SERMON 173 show that, though they use different meta- phors, yet they speak the same language ; pile their spoils of the emotions on the Biblical trophies of conduct, join beauty to grace — the cult of the humanities to the ethical lessons of the Scriptures — and the voices of earth and heaven wiU rise in unison to assert the seriousness of religion's claim. Hebraism, in other words, has a message to deliver, a vital function to perform, under Biodem social conditions, and it is a defensible corollary that modern Jews must prove them- selves the trustees of that mission. I am leaning so heavily in this chapter on the aid of stronger men, that I need not apologize for referring to a passage in, perhaps, the most ingenious but certainly the least effec- tive of Matthew Arnold's writings. It occurs in Celtic Literature, where Arnold is discussing, in a vein particularly congenial to himself, the comparative success and failure of The Golden Treasury and The Book of Praise re- spectively. He discovers the cause to lie in the displacement of the Semitic age of man by the Indo-European : ' whereas the Semitic genius placed its highest spiritual life in therehgious ^_ ^av.^1 M 174 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM sentiment, and made that the basis of its poetry, the Indo-European genius places its highest spiritual life in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis of its poetry ' ; so, when we defy this law, and try to pour modem verse into Semitic vessels, ' our poetry leaves the true course, and must reveal this by not speaking a living language'. It is rather heavy artillery to bring into the field, of criticism, even in the excellent cause of F. T. Palgrave's anthology ; but the one point which stands out clearly is the imperious need of expression for that quality which was ' religious sentiment ' and is now ' imagina- tive reason'. The need is greater every year, as the modem Indo-Europeans^ — we ourselves more simply — grow further apart from the world's Semitic age. We have to watch with keen apprehension the disappearance, or super- session, of the standard of intellectual im- agination. Meredith and Watts upheld it in the generation which is passing away, and each is less popular and exerts less influence to-day than the obvious allegorists of the Hall Caine type in fiction and the Frederic Leighton type in painting. A A LAY SERMON 175 On every side we see the need of Semitic — lor Hebraic— ideals, to correct the defects of tHellenism. Hellenism is declining before our r«yes. In its intellectual aspects it hardens nto rationalism and positivism ; in its noral aspects it weakens into sentimental- ism. The worship of ' sport ' at the univer- sities and pubhc schools, among the ' flan- nelled fools ' of Mr. Kipling's denunciation ; its not less dangerous analogues in inferior strata of society, in evidence whereof I might summon the far more serious indictment of Dr. Shadwell's Industrial E^cieticy ' ; the anarchical campaigns conducted under the banner of liberty in favour of manhood suf- frage, the enfranchisement of women, free thought, free love, and so forth ; the relaxa- tion of individual effort and the consequent dependence on all kinds of state socialism ; the reluctance to arm authority with disci- pline ; the growing selfishness of class-in- terests : in these ways and others we mark the hardening of the Hellenic standard of intellect and the softening of the Hellenic standard of conduct. Thebrilhancy of the one appeals to ^ Longmans, 1906, 176 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM no canon but human reason ; the wide in- terests of the other suffer for lack of concentra- tion. In all this Hebraism is wanted; its place and function are defined. The Hebrew conception of charity — ^to select a single virtue — differs toto ccelo from the quality wliich passes by that name among certain humani- tarians of to-day. It includes the encourage- ment of self-help, thrift and self-respect. Hebraism is a steadying force, adding^ power to conduct and emotion to intellect. To Hebraism are confided the forces which will ultimately re-act against the diffuseness, the tolerance, the ^mimaginat^veness of the present generation. It is in art as in morals, and the people which gave morahty to the world should have the courage to assert and to uphold' the assertion in their hves, three practical precepts : The unmorai is not beautiful. The unruled is not free, The not-t>eautiful and not-free is not true. The first of these precepts gives us whose god is Beauty ; the second gives us conduct, whose god is Hygeia — health, bodily and mental ; and the third gives us tnii I s us ! dily rutj^y god is God. It matters little or not a.t an under which system of human thought ■ we seek truth in our lives. Those who inherit the system which the Old Testament conveys, ^Hond who reject from their inheritance all ^^attempts at continuation or completion — professing Jews, in other words— have a method at their disposal which is simple, uniform and direct, and which possesses a language as adequate as any to the subject with which it deals. Its comparative im- »aunity from fixed dogmata of ' belief ' con- ers a further advantage which the system nas been swift to use in the descent through the centuries — it appeals to feelings, not to facts, and whenever it avails itself of facts, in its concrete dealings with humanity, it appeals through such shifting facts to a feeling Lbeyond : They are the vessel of the Thought. The vessel splits, the Thought survives. For the God of Hebraism must include teauty and Hygeia ; or, rather, where these fre not, the Hebrew forgets his God. And tigrhen the spirit of the age tends to relax all pnds, when tolerance runs away, when luxury 178 THE FUNCTION OF HEBRAISM" ' creeps in, when indifference enervates, then that rehgion is a sham which pretends to cultivate truth on holy-days and sabbaths, while it neglects art and conduct in the work- shop and the playground. Art which ' evades its difficulties ' and conduct which surrenders to self-indulgence are aUke irreligious : the one is ugly, the other unhealthy, and these are parts of untruth. Here, therefore, is the function of Hebraism in the age in which we live. To uphold, 'in art as in morals', the standard of the God of truth, and to oppose, in art and conduct, false taste and ignoble aims, is an ideal faithful to Jewish teaching and valuable to English practice. We Jews are too prone to beUeve that good taste lies ouigj the Pale. ■I ■ " Hi i 1 STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES CECIL H, GREEN LIBRARY STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305-6004 {415) 723-1493 All books may be recalled after 7 doys DATE DUE u |*aft